The Programme

CHAPTER SEVEN-3

“Meaning?” Matthew asked.

“Abuse, misuse of authority, maybe worse.” Rape.

Nahum, loyal to both Matthew and Jemima, reminded them:

“We’re already confronting more than one claim.”

Amanda Kroger’s case concerned the greatest amount of money, and Hammer Reach itself, but there were three other former members who were trying to recover lesser sums put into the group; two of them were already hinting that if they did not get it back, it would not only be psychological abuse that might be alleged against The Programme.

Cassandra observed:

“It is at the point just before a group becomes strong that the greatest number of enemies will gather to try - one last time - to destroy it: earlier, there will not have been enough people who will have been involved in or around the group who yet want to attack it; later, the group will be strong enough to resist.”

Father Christopher proclaimed:

“Four out of every five people who come into The Programme want to be told what to do - want to be controlled, dominated even - sexually as much as spiritually; we don’t need the others.”

Father Nahum said:

“I’m sure some of us don’t want them.”

Because it was Nahum - because none of them was ready for a showdown - because none of them was yet out of touch with the essential humour of The Programme - everyone started to laugh, led by Caleb, the target of the remark. He rose and stepped across Christopher and a handful of other members between them, to kneel in front of Nahum.

“I am one,” he said.

“We are many,” Nahum replied.

“Together we shall be whole,” the Council chanted.

That night, Matthew took Carey out to dinner.

It was still light. He took her to the Moonlight Inn overlooking a calm, clear spring-water lake, surrounded by untouched forest and meadows, fern banks, moss-covered boulders, rolling hills, an abandoned railroad bed. The loudest sound was nature itself.

Moonlight Inn was a low-slung cluster of wooden houses, tennis courts, jetty, dockside sun-deck, Adirondack chairs and recliners. There were substantial, one-storey extensions built onto either side of the three-storey original house, one of them encased in glass. The upper storeys were painted green, the ground floor white. There were stone slabs for steps to the front entrance, which led directly into a cosy hall that fulfilled the dual functions of lounge and reception. It was furnished with deep armchairs and a sofa, a piano, and an antique desk behind which sat the matriarch who ran the Inn.

The atmosphere was - like Hedgerow - late 19th century, early 20th; nothing much had changed since. Life was slow at Moonlight Inn. Before they went into dinner, they spent ten minutes visiting with the innkeeper, answering questions about their journeys, both immediate and to America. She nodded when they told her they were with The Programme, over at Hammer Reach, as if to say it was none of her business what people did so long as they did not disturb anyone else. Matthew charmed her; Carey was quiet but sweet. The woman told them that she had clients from all over the world, and of every imaginable occupation and opinion. Her repeat clients were her friends.

They sat for a while at the stove-pipe bar before their table was ready in the restaurant itself. The menu was rich, varied, inviting: smoked trout, homemade linguine with whole-wheat pasta, jumbo shrimp to start; venison, pheasant, duck, pasta with seafood, fresh steamed fish to follow. Vegetarianism was set aside. The portions were plentiful. Carey could barely finish either course, refused dessert. Matthew had suggested wine: Carey had hesitated, then accepted.

“I thought you’d want to spend the time around the house,” Carey quizzed him. “After all,” it was an opportunity to see his disciples and to ensure that they saw him and remembered who The Programme was about.

“It’s not really my style,” he said. “I’m best one-on-one.”

“I know,“she blushed, thinking of their most intimate times alone.

It was not always the way it had been when he had taken her that first night. They could make tender love without a hint of power and position. Sometimes, she rubbed his body with massage oils, and he hers, until their bodies seemed like a single, joined, erogenous zone. At other times, urgently, they would fall on each other in a frenzy: one evening, when he came to collect her after a meeting in her office, they had screwed on her desk; another time in the kitchen at her house; or in the shower, clinging precariously onto the shower-rod with her legs around his waist.

She had grown used to his body, ageing and blemished, still lean and fit but sturdy like a weathered post planted in the ground long ago. He could not have been more different from the bodies of the younger men she was used to, perfected and polished in the gym. She liked to kiss his scar, lick her way up his spine, she could bring herself to orgasm that way clenching her thighs against him, straddling him, rubbing against him rolling him over afterwards and mounting him in a frenzy.

Once, during a Midnight Mass, she had watched Lucius watching Matthew and knew instantly they had been together. It disturbed her but - though she thought it ought to do so - it did not shock her. Later, in his private quarters, she had asked him. Matthew had said simply:

“I love them all.”

She had said to Matthew:

“Can it really be this simple? Can we really change ourselves this easily?”

“What do you think? How does it feel to you?”

“I want it to be; it is. I just can’t believe, well, that it can go along like this.”

“The hardest part is to start. It’ll keep happening as long as you want it to. Once you’ve begun, you’ve got choices that are at least equal, keep going or turn back. Mostly, once you’ve begun, you realise that there’s very little to go back to, it isn’t even an equal choice but far preferable to carry on.”

“But I’m a lawyer,” she cried, as if it was the greatest block of all.

“Lawyers think they’re special; perhaps they are; perhaps that’s what takes them into the law. But they’re often unhappy at it, and that’s what makes them look around for something different; there’s more of them to be found in groups than people realise. There are many lawyers in Scientology, and the Moonies; three of the dead at Jonestown were lawyers; several of the members of the order of the Solar Temple were lawyers. There was an English group based in Portugal - the International Saturday Group; it recruited from the professional classes -including doctors and lawyers. Think of one of the oldest sect of all.” She had shaken her head and he had said: “Freemasonry.” She knew that it was positively riddled with lawyers, to the highest ranks of the profession.

“Is that what The Programme is? A sect? A cult?”

“It’s The Programme. Beyond that, you have to make up your own mind.”

Every inch of Matthew exuded wisdom, good-will, confidence; she had been looking for him - if she had but realised it - for all of her life.

At Moonlight, she said, for the first time:

“I’ve fallen in love with you.”

“I know. Do you mind?”

She knew he could not respond in kind. As he had said, he loved them all. She shook her head shyly.

“It’s comfortable. Appropriate is a word that I can’t seem to get out of my head. I like being with you; I mean, all the time I’m with you, I like it.” She had chosen him, as much as he had chosen her. It was not like it had been with, say, Patrick: then, she had reserved the major part of herself, chosen only to sleep with him. With Matthew, she had chosen a way of life.

Leah, the former SoHo Tanya, came up in the morning from Boston, driving Helen at Matthew’s request. Several other members had already left: Helen, too, would go straight back to Boston, although Leah was due for a stay at Hammer Reach.

Matthew went for a walk with Helen. He pointedly invited Carey along; Carey - equally pointedly - declined. Instead, she sat out on the deck smoking with Leah. Carey was in civilian clothes; Leah in white.

“How long have you, er, been involved with The Programme?” Carey probed.

“I met them the first day they were in Boston,” Leah answered gleaming: she had already acquired that special intensity about her eyes that Carey termed ’the look’. “The first day,” she repeated, as if any other day would not have been good enough.

“What were you doing there?”

“I don’t know,” she laughed. “Nothing, really. I was at Radcliffe for a while. Then, when my father did his thing, I dropped out but, um, I found I couldn’t go back to New York either. I just stayed on.” She shrugged. “I guess I was waiting for The Programme.”

“Your brother said, both of you were thrown by it.”

“It was, I don’t know, like everything we knew was just, well, chucked away. I don’t mean we were especially close to our parents, that wasn’t the sort of relationship we had. But it was solid, all the same. I thought, they knew what they were doing and we fitted in with that and that was how we knew what we were doing too. I was going to do medicine, go in with my father, you know?”

“I do know,” Carey said. “My father’s a lawyer: we were always expected to go into his firm. My brother and myself. And that’s what we did.”

“But you’re here now?”

“Sort of,” Carey admitted. “But I’m not a resident, just an Acolyte. I’m The Programme’s English lawyer,” she added.

“A bit more than that,” Leah told her she knew about Matthew.

Carey nodded: it didn’t call for a reply; something about the sly way Leah had said it had put her off. It was not so much prurience as sensuality, as if for a split second Leah had slid between their naked bodies. She noticed that, when not smoking, Leah laid her hands on her thighs, kneading them gently. There was something in the air between them that was s****l, not warming as it could be with Emily but predatory.

“I don’t think he thought about us. One night - well, I guess we knew something was up for a few days, my parents were hardly talking and when they did they just fought - he told us that he was giving it all up, it no longer meant anything to him, he wasn’t sure it ever had. He said - this was his exact words - he had lost the will to heal, he had to find it again. Oh, sure, he kept saying how much he loved us, how he didn’t want to lose us, but, bottom line, we weren’t enough for him. In one sense, I thought it was quite admirable; he had enough money - plenty enough - and he wasn’t going to live his life as a fraud anymore. But that made his life up to then a fraud - his life and his relationship with me - at least that was, you know, how it felt.”

“And now?”

“Now I understand it a lot better. I was doing a lot of drugs - legal stuff, too Valium, you know. I’ve stopped all that; my head’s a lot clearer. The Seer’s been helping me, personally. That’s why I’m staying on here: to do some more work with her. I wish I knew where he was: I’d like to see him, or write to him, tell him what I’m doing, tell him I understand. It was his purpose. We all have our purpose,” she repeated, sounding unsure, wistful, staring off towards the woods where they could just make out Matthew and Helen walking side by side, maybe hand in hand. She murmured: “Nothing’s forever, right?”

“Sure.”

“What’s he like? Matthew, I mean.”

“In what way?” Carey asked guardedly.

“I don’t know. We’ve only got, you know, a vague sense of him; I mean, we know he’s The Teacher, and we’ve seen his picture and read his writing; some of the people who came over just worship him, you know, but there’s a feeling, maybe, I don’t know, that maybe he’s had his time and it’s The Seer’s time instead. Is that a terrible thing to say?” she asked artlessly.

From The Seer’s Lesson On Hierarchy:

The Programme hierarchy exists to serve the members. It can only do so if the members accept its absolute authority. The hierarchy of The Programme is the accumulation of the years of training and preparation in which we have been engaged, drawing on our inner resources, achieving our inner vision, the shared experience of recognising the God and Satan within each of us, until they could take on an existence of their own that was strong enough and distinct enough to lead us forward as commanders of the army of their own unification.