The Programme

CHAPTER TWO-3

“I do. But unless they carried Hammer Reach back with them in their pockets, I don’t think we can claim jurisdiction over the farm.”

“I’m going over soon anyway.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea at the moment.”

He raised his eyebrows in enquiry.

“We ought to consider whether it will hurt or help the jurisdiction claim for you to be there; I’d like New York counsel’s view first.”

They talked money She was always ill at ease asking for money on account. Charles never found it a problem; it fit his style to make people pursue him to obtain his services. Colin had no trouble with it either: some of his clients could write out cheques for thousands on demand. Most of her clients were usually on legal aid and needed only to complete the forms; cash did not come into it. Matthew was unworried.

“I’ll write you a cheque now on one condition.”

“What?”

“That you let me take you out to lunch first.”

“Now?” The smile fell from her face. She rarely went out to lunch during the working day: her father, an occasional friend, an even more occasional client she liked or perhaps a professional, referral client she wanted to treat for venal reasons.

“All right,” she said suddenly, “if you let me take you.” She slid the event into an established package. He was a private client, a paying client.

“Fine.”

He could receive as well as give.

“Is Matthew your real name?”

They were at Fredericks in Camden Passage. It was within a brisk eight minute stroll of the office; they used it for office parties, private conferences between faction partners, taking commercial clients to lunch.

They were seated in the Garden Room. It was a vast conservatory, with a fifteen or twenty foot high smoked-glass ceiling forming a sloping roof, two trees growing inside, and one glass wall which opened onto the garden and patio where, in the warm weather, an extra half-dozen tables would be installed beneath parasols.

“Yes,” Matthew said. He raised his glass of wine to her: “Matthew was a publican,” in the Bible.

“It meant tax-collector,” she corrected him. Memories of her mother were never far from her mind, and with them fragments of religious memorabilia.

He inclined his head to one side: touché.

“Which are you, Matthew?”

“Publican or tax-collector?” Bon viveur or someone who extracted money from others? “Neither, I hope. I love life but I don’t need to drink to enjoy it; nor do I ask for money from anyone - though they often give it to me.”

“I’m sure they do.” She was combative: the side of her that liked him fighting the side of her that despised and feared what he did. “It’s why they do it that matters.”

“I give them something they need,” he answered unperturbed.

“That makes you a salesman”.

“No more than you: people need peace as much as they need law.”

She shrugged: she was no defender of the legal faith.

“It’s a lot more powerful,” she replied.

“Which? Law?”

“No. Law is government; government is powerful; but it doesn’t own you - at least in a democracy.”

“Correct. Which leaves the whole area of your private life and your private feelings to work out all on your own.”

“Which gives you terrific power over your members, doesn’t it?”

“They award me that power - much like a democracy.”

The waiter brought their food. He covered his glass after the waiter had refilled hers, nodded when he was offered more mineral water instead.

She flushed. “I don’t normally drink during the day. We’ve got a meeting this afternoon - a full partners’ meeting. This is anaesthetic.”

“Will your father be there?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” he grinned.

“You’re too direct for me. Too perceptive, too.”

“It’s not a difficult conclusion. Brother and sister in famous father’s firm. Full meeting; drinking to protect yourself.”

She looked up and held his eyes. Briefly, she shivered; suddenly she felt the warmth of him physically well up inside her, almost sexually; not almost. She reminded herself he was a client. Skipped around for something with which to bridge the discussion back to work. Asked:

“The Seer - Cassandra?”

He nodded, leaving her to make the pace.

“Is she your wife?” Damn; wrong question.

“Legally. We don’t - uh - live together.” She understood what he was telling her. “It’s about The Programme now.”

“I don’t understand the, er, structure of The Programme,” she was still not sure whether to refer to it as a group, a church or an organisation.

“You should come and visit us,” he said. “Come and see how we live and work. Come down to the Coffee Lounge one evening.”

“I’m too old for that sort of thing,” she laughed nervously, wondering how he had known she had time to burn of an evening.

“What sort of thing?” he asked with affected naivety.

“Going to a coffee bar; it’s the sort of thing students do.”

“Young people have a monopoly on wanting to meet new people or find new ideas?”

The waiter arrived to offer dessert. Both refused. She shook her head when he sought to pour the rest of the wine into her glass, asked for coffee; Matthew ordered lemon tea. She said:

“I know what you’re saying; but it is true, isn’t it? As you get older you’re not looking so hard, you don’t want constant change.”

“Sure. It’s like a blank canvas. You start off with nothing on it, and fill it a bit at a time, giving the blank space a colour or a shape of your choice, with less of it left as time goes on; the choices keep getting harder, because you’ve still to find what will make the canvas into a complete picture that works and there’s less and less room left to do it in. What do you do if you can’t find the right way to finish it?”

She shook her head; it was his image, not hers.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-nine. Why?”

“It’s not so old.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-one,” he laughed.

“You don’t look it.” She would have put him in his early forties. “You’ve kept well,” she laughed to cover her embarrassment.

“You too,” he said quietly, affirming the undercurrent between them. “You’re far too young to be afraid of new ideas or new people.”

“You never answered the question,” she reminded him.

“What you do if you’ve filled the canvas up and it still doesn’t work?”

She nodded.

“Oh,” he laughed, “that’s easy. You paint it all over and start again.”

Http://www.the-programme.org.uk (turn on sound if available).

You can only make a choice by committing to it wholly, holding nothing back; otherwise, it is half a choice which is worse than none, creating the impression of having made a choice, yet guaranteed to fail - simply because you have not tried it out wholeheartedly. Catch-22: without committing wholly, you cannot find out for sure; if you commit wholly, and find out you have made the wrong choice, you think you will be lost, for want of having held anything back with which to escape. That is the fear that holds us all back. It is wrong. Even if you commit every inch of your being to something, you are still you and you will be stronger for having done so; you cannot lose from the choice you make; you gain at least the ability to make it.

Charles was trying to control himself. Alistair had been right: they were fairly evenly split. Carey had yet to speak up, had sat to one side in a reverie of her own. Charles hoped she was distracted by a case or some other kind of problem and that she hadn’t been drinking again.

Graham Engel waved his banner from the moral high ground.

“Life changes. Today, helping the poor means creating jobs, not defending their right to unemployment benefit or social security. Back in Alistair’s good old sixties, youngsters mugged and robbed because they were socially deprived, psychologically abused, undernourished saints or geniuses manqué; nowadays, they’re nasty little villains we’d hang or shoot if we could be sure we were getting more than half the convictions right. It’s not unprincipled to change but stubborn to stay the same.”

It was the second time that day Charles had been called stubborn; he would not take it from young Engel the way he would from Alistair.

“Oppression is timeless, and it is a practice that is exclusive to the powerful. Those little villains weren’t born that way, they were made,” he thundered.

Colin - at the opposite end of the long conference table from his father - held his hands up in a low gesture of surrender. “You can’t help it, Dad, can you? It’s always got to be about the big picture.”

“This firm wasn’t built by small ambitions,” Charles rasped. “Every time you take a step, you’re choosing a direction: and the next step forward starts where the last one ended. I’m the first to agree we need to do more private work and the first to say we need to survive. You don’t hear me objecting to your finance packages or offshore investment work. That’s realism. Taking sides with employers is just that - taking sides; and we’d be taking sides against the people who made this firm what it is.”

“I’ve had a quiet word with one or two of my clients,” Alison chipped in. “Put it abstractly, but enough for them to know what I meant. They made quite clear what sort of reaction to expect.”

“It’s always in the way you ask the question,” Colin brushed aside. “I’d like to hear from some of the others,” Charles suggested, meaning those who were not on the firm’s Management Committee.

They went around the table, some responding in a few words, others with a wave of a hand to say that had nothing to contribute, a small number speaking at length, with feeling, almost all of these - as Charles had found out earlier - in favour of staying away from the new opportunity, hanging for a while longer onto the firm’s reputation and their own idealism.

Charles stared triumphantly down the table at his son.

“Well?” He asked whether Colin wanted it put to a vote.

Colin glanced around, checking the figures, and nodded to concede that - close though it still was - he would not win. His eyes narrowed as he stared back at Charles.

At about seven thirty, Patrick came into Carey’s room.

“So?”

She smiled, beckoned him in, flirtatious.

“Watcha doin’, Mister P?”

He lowered himself into one of the two comfortable armchairs across the desk from her.

“What are you up to, Carey?” he asked in reply.

“I’m not sure, really,” she admitted. “Some cult-type thing ...” She paused to see if Patrick knew anything about it. He shook his head. “I’m not sure if it’s Colin’s revenge on the rest of us, a bad joke, or a real case.”

Patrick reached across and picked up the magazine with Matthew’s picture on it. He glowered at it, held it by a corner as if it might smell bad. “And you all think I’m mad?”

She smiled again.

“I think you’re rather sweet, really, Patrick. Far more sweet than mad.”

He laughed: she could say things like that to him; she could say anything to him.

“All the same, I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Mind-nazis. What are we doing acting for people like this? Jesus, to think people object to acting for employers; this is what I call objectionable.”

She came around her desk without any shoes on and, as she had done in Colin’s room, slid up onto the desk. She watched Patrick’s eyes divert from the portrait of Matthew to her legs, his tongue flash across his lips.

He reached out and ran a hand up beneath the skirt of her suit, to the point where the flesh met; he waited for a second to see if she parted her legs and, when she did not, withdrew without trying to force her.

“What do you want, Carey?”

“I want dinner. How about you?”

They had been on-again and off-again, serious and casual, lovers and mere companions, for almost two years. In the beginning, he had set the pace and - unsure of his feelings for her - might fairly have been described as blowing hot and cold. By the time he realised he was in love with her, she had slipped back into her shell, willing only to continue it for company and occasional s*x.

They ate and talked, and Carey drank and smoked too much, and then they went back to his flat as they always did when she had decided to sleep with him. She put up a good show of enthusiasm. As he stood in his kitchen opening a bottle of wine, she threw her jacket onto a sofa, unbuttoned her blouse and reached behind to unclasp her bra. Then she came up behind him and pressed her breasts against his back, refusing to let go as he wriggled to turn around, sliding one hand inside his own shirt while with the other she unzipped him and scratched lightly beneath his briefs before finally, let him turn around.

He was mashed against the kitchen counter. They kissed feverishly. He hiked up her skirt and slid his hand around to reach her from behind. Over his shoulder, she picked up the ice cold bottle and swigged from it: first one for herself, then - holding it in her mouth - one for him. She pulled away from his grasp, slid to her knees and - careful to let none of the wine escape - sucked him into her mouth. He moaned as she drove him into the wine; the cold made the skin contract but also made him twice as hard. It was not until later, in bed and pounding her violently and anonymously from behind as she liked, that he finally burst.

At about two o’clock, she slid out of his bed, careful not to wake him. This was why she always slept with him at his flat, not her house: maybe once or twice she had made herself stay until morning; usually, though, she dozed off lightly, thrashed around for a while, then failed to sink into a real sleep. She would get dressed and either walk home - it took about twenty minutes at that time of night - or cab it, struggling with the troubled memories, profound fears and private, unfilled ambitions that had disturbed her post-coital slumber.