The Programme

CHAPTER SEVEN-1

CHAPTER SEVEN“There are only two things that you do with one hundred per cent of your being: being born and dying. They’re the only things you do with your body as a whole, your mind as a whole, and your soul. The rest of the time, what we are doing is what we most want to do, slowed down by the part of us that doesn’t want to do it: we call what we do the purpose, and that which is left undone the counter-purpose. We have to beat being held back by our own counter-purpose,” Matthew lectured.

They were in New York, SoHo, a brownstone town-house off Spring Street, about halfway between Washington Square and City Hall. This was the base for the New York mission, which Matthew was here to inaugurate into a Chapter, complete with ground floor Coffee Lounge, street selling, meditations and meetings. Within three months of her arrival at Hammer Reach, Cassandra had set up not just the one new, designated Chapter in Boston but another in New York as well.

Rapid expansion called for rapid recruitment to staff the Chapters, to raise money and for their connections. Matthew and Cassandra had approached Arthur Rockworth and convinced him that the move was as much in Anthony’s interest as that of others and Rockworth had let them use his name with people who did good works in New England, the sort of people who might be attracted to a new initiative. Through one of them they had lucked into Brookline, one of the smartest suburbs of Boston, on a deal not dissimilar to Chesterfield Gardens but without a lease or any other security.

The house in SoHo belonged to a middle-aged doctor who had thrown up family and a wealthy practice in pursuit of long-betrayed ideals: his wife had returned to her native Florida, the paintings and antiques were in storage while house and car were left in the charge of their children. One of them - Tanya - had joined The Programme in Boston; the other - Chad - lonely and abandoned, was studying at Columbia and, eager to appease his sister, had agreed to The Programme taking over all but one room of the house, in which he continued to live until - as expected - he was absorbed into the group.

At the current rate, The Programme would have doubled its membership in less than a year. Matthew was not without worries: rapid growth was bought at cost of dilution; the emphasis on self-development that The Programme placed in England dictated the sort of recruit they got. It was being replaced by prepackaged gratification, with an accent on the mutuality of exploration, adventure, more than a hint of the esoteric and the exotic. Matthew recalled Micah’s line: ’Give us your poor, your oppressed, your psychotics.’ If visitors to the English Chapter were open to change, those in New York would be positively insistent - and they would want it at once.

Carey was over with him for the Kroger jurisdiction hearing, though it was still more than a week away and they were planning to take off for a few days first. Cassandra wanted the case to generate publicity for the new Chapter. If some might be put off by the avaricious, mind-bending cult that the lawyers for Amanda’s sister - Petra Gruenfeld - would undoubtedly call them, there would be many more who would be curious, even interested, some would be attracted.

From the back of what would be the Coffee Lounge when, after tonight, it opened to casual visitors, Carey listened intently. From the moment they had touched down on American soil, she had been troubled, oppressed by the idea that it was an error to have come over with Matthew, not professionally but personally. It was not The Programme doctrine that vexed her but her relationship with it: purpose, counter-purpose.

“What life is about, in the end, is a series of choices, from choices over what to wear, or eat, or what book to read, to choices about what job to do, or with whom to strike up a relationship. There are always choices, even if it is between action and inaction. And, whenever we have a choice, if we can envisage alternatives, there must be some part of us, however tiny, which is capable of each of them: otherwise, they could not come to mind. In practice, we normally have a range of choices, and as a matter of routine what we choose is the option which seems to us at that moment of choice to represent the strongest impulse; it’s a sort of psychological fascism - the strongest impulse always wins out.”

He paused.

“What I’m talking about is what happens to the choices we don’t make, the ones we discard. We call this difference purpose and counter-purpose: we become what we do; but we are made up of all the things we could have done, or the choices we could have made. Purpose and counter-purpose,” he repeated. “Purpose is what we do; counter-purpose is what is left behind.”

“We believe that people can only find fulfilment with others: if you have an impulse that you cannot fit into your own way of life, then it may fit into someone else’s, through whom you can express it for yourself. This is not about surrogate activity, second-hand living or voyeurism; it’s about finding a framework in which many people can between them make up a way of life together in which they can all be whole.

“We have to find a way to be whole. There is no halfway; halfway in is halfway out, just as half good is half evil. It’s like loving someone: you either do or you don’t.”

“Couldn’t you just love him?” a queen in the row in front of Carey stagewhispered to his friend. “Isn’t he just the way you wished Daddy looked when he came calling in the night?”

Carey suppressed a giggle. There had indeed been something s****l in Matthew’s voice and in the way he was carrying himself and the atmosphere had acquired a nervous titillation, erotic and enticing. She exchanged a glance with Meredith. She had barely known her in England but they had become close in the week she had been in New York. Merry smiled, nodded and mouthed in confirmation that she had sensed the same:

“I am one.”

Carey mouthed back:

“We are many.”

Despite her reservations, she was no longer embarrassed to participate in the exchange - on a busy day, it seemed like hundreds of times. She had learned how the words could bear a different meaning depending on the circumstances. Cassandra was currently at Hammer Reach - where she and Matthew were going next - but she had visited New York for a couple of days. When she said ’I am one,’ what she meant was that she was the one and the reply was understood to mean that they were all in a cluster beneath her. Others could mean the exact opposite, that they were, humbly, but one amongst many. Merry meant that she was one who had understood and that Carey was another.

Carey had yet to tell Colin how close she had become to Matthew and to The Programme. He hadn’t wanted to know when it suited him, now he could wait until it suited her, when she was wholly clear about what she was doing. He was already concluding his negotiations with Andrew Chettle and Jessica Harvey: the one time she had seen them together, she had caught a frisson of attraction between Chettle’s principal colleague and her brother, though she knew it would not happen nor, thinking guiltily of her nephew and nieces, would she want it to.

Emily was moving into Carey’s house: Richard had offered her a price for her share of their flat which Carey had advised her to accept, hoping she was advising disinterestedly, knowing it was foregone that Emily would move in with her, not merely happy but anxious for her to do so, uncertain what developments it would bring to their relationship. She no more wanted to slip back to her former existence than Emily could afford to go back to hers.

Matthew wound up his talk. Some members of the audience began to leave. Others looked around, unsure where to put themselves, needing a lead. It was the job of The Programme members to help them feel at home. Carey spied a man on his own - half-way between staying and leaving - standing by the table-display of magazines and booklets in the hall, most of them imported from England, but a couple of them produced in America. She went to work, hovering beside him until she caught his attention:

“Hello. I’m Carey. What’s your name?”

“Calvin,” he answered nervously. “Calvin Wood.”

“Hello Calvin,” Carey held out a hand. “Would you like to come into the Coffee Lounge?”

When Father Caleb said ’I am one,’ Carey - despite herself - shivered. It meant he was the one who could, at will, do anything he wanted to her, and to as many others as he wanted.

They were at Hammer Reach, the Kroger farm in the Catskills in upstate New York, the nearest town - Hedgerow - a ghost-town from which the youth had fled and which survived only to service the surrounding rural community, with turn-of-the century frontages, a fifties soda-shop, hardware and farm machinery store with an antique Sears catalogue sign in the window, a gas station and the Trading Post in which the proprietor fulminated evenly against excessive government intervention and people who exploited the freedom to carry weapons, and sold a range of goods from Indian pottery to fringed jackets in raw brown leather that he had stitched himself.

Until The Programme took it over, there had been no farming at Hammer Reach for more than a decade. They had put some of the land to a vegetable garden, there were chickens for eggs, a cow for milk and a couple of horses. The buildings showed signs of recent works: if there was one particular skill The Programme seemed to bring out in its members it was carpentry.

Cassandra - in black silk blouse and black shorts - came out of the house to greet them when they drove up in the doctor’s smoked-glass Lincoln, loaned them by his son in SoHo. It had not been a long trip from New York City: three hours up Route 17 exiting at Hedgerow. She was accompanied by a small, sharp-featured, black-haired man who could have been her twin.

“Matthew. Look who’s here.”

“Carey, this is Cassandra’s brother Huw,” Matthew introduced.

“Hi,” Carey held out a hand, adding automatically, “I am one.”

“Yes,” Huw replied. “I know who you are.” Carey flushed: she knew enough of The Programme to have learned that being whole did not equate to perfect harmony, but this was the first time she had taken a strike against herself.

She snapped: “Together we shall be whole,” as if Huw had given the standard reply.

Cassandra giggled the high-pitched giggle that was her unnatural trade-mark. “Our first lawyer.”

“Huw was one of our founder members,” Matthew explained. “He left because there wasn’t a title for him - anyway, not one of his own. Does this mean you’re back in the fold, Huw?”

“Is there a vacancy, Matthew?”

They were standing in the driveway in front of the main house. The immediate area had been lawned; behind the house, on both sides, were outbuildings - two barns, one in breeze blocks, the other in wood; also, a storage hut. Between the house and the storage hut, some people were working on what appeared to be the foundations of a new building. The fields glistened golden in the sun, curving gently upwards and into the distance where they ended, so far as the eye could see, in a thick, silvery copse of mixed trees - sycamores, chesnuts, maples, fir-pines with a wide, clear path cut between them.

Matthew looked around proprietorially.

“This is mine,” he said. “I have a life-tenancy of it.”

Carey watched the scowl flash across Huw’s face.

Cassandra took Matthew’s arm.

“Ours, Matthew,” she said ambiguously: ours, because they were married, or ours because it belonged to The Programme.

Father Caleb led them straight through the house.

“We’ve repaired the deck,” he explained to Matthew.

There were more than twenty members staying in the house, including a couple of children. Some of them were unknown to Matthew; they went about their business, self-conscious because The Teacher was present. Others were Superiors and Senior Messengers who had come to Hammer Reach in order to confer with him: this afternoon, he would hold a Council Meeting.