Some nine months after the revelational paper in the BJE I received a call from Harley who asked me to meet him at his house in Hampstead. I had heard echoes of the kind of work my colleagues had been getting involved in and I had consistently been at pains in my interviews with the press to dissociate myself from whatever it was they were up to. I had my suspicions and I burned with curiosity as I strained on my foldaway bicycle up from the flat I had rented at Child’s Hill to the heights of Hampstead.
The big design fault with these foldaways is that the wheels are too small. Added to that the hinge in the main frame of the machine never achieves sufficient rigidity to prevent the production of a strange undulating motion as one labours to cover ground. I mention this in passing, because I think the state I was in by the time I reached Gayton Road helps to explain my initial passivity in the face of what could only be described as an abomination.
Harley let me in himself. He occupied a large terraced house on Gayton Road. I had known that he was well-off but even so I was surprised by the fact that there was only one bell, with his name on it, set by the shiny front door. He led me into a large room which ran from the front to the back of the house. It was well lit by a wash of watery light from the high sash windows. The walls of the room were stacked with books, most of them paperbacks. The floorboards had been stripped, painted black, and polished to a sheen. Scattered here and there around the floor were rugs with bright, abstract designs woven into them. Thin angled lamps obviously of Italian design stood around casting isolated fields of yellow light. One stood on the desk — a large, flat serviceable oak table — its bill wavering over the unravelling skein of what I assumed to be Harley’s labours, which spewed from the chattering mouth of a printer attached to his computer.
There were remarkably few objects in the room, just the odd bibelot here and there, a Japanese ivory or an Arawak head carved from pumice and pinioned by a steel rod to a cedarwood block. I felt sick with exertion and slumped down on a leather and aluminium chair. Harley went to the desk and toyed with a pen, doodling with hand outstretched. The whine of the machine filled the room. He seemed nervous.
‘You know the Quantity Theory of Insanity …’ he began. I laughed shortly. ‘… Yes, well … Haven’t you always maintained that what is true for societal groups can also be proved for any sub-societal group as well?’
‘Yes, that has been an aspect of the theory. In fact an integral part. After all, how do you define a “society” or a “social group” with any real, lasting rigour? You can’t. So the theory had to apply itself to all possible kinds of people-groupings.’
‘Parent — Teacher Associations?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cub Scout groups?’
‘Yes.’
‘Suburban philatelic societies?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Loose fraternities of rubberwear fetishists?’
‘Why on earth not … my dear man …’
‘How about therapeutic groups set up specifically to exploit the hidden mechanisms that Quantity Theory draws our attention to?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know. Groups of people who band together in order to effect a calculated redistribution of the elements of their particular sanity quotient. Forming an artificial group so that they can trade off a period of mental instability against one of radical stability.’
‘What! You mean a sort of sanity time-share option?’
‘Yeah, that kind of thing.’
I was feigning ignorance, of course. I had foreseen this development, so had my critics, although they hadn’t correctly located where the danger lay. Not with vain and struggling despots who would tranquillise whole ethnic minorities in order to stabilise the majority, but with people like Harley, the educated, the liberal, the early adopters.
‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose in theory …’
‘Have a look at this …’ He swiped a scarf of computer paper from the still chattering printer and handed it to me. I read; and saw at a glance that Harley wasn’t talking about theory at all, he was talking about practice. The printout detailed the latest of what was clearly a series of ongoing and contained trials, which involved the monitoring of the sanity quotients within two groups. There was an ‘active’ and an ‘inactive’ group. The groups were defined entirely arbitrarily. That was all, but it was sufficient. From the quantitative analysis that Harley had undertaken it could be clearly demonstrated that the stability of the two groups differed in an inverse correlation to one another.
‘What is this?’ I demanded. ‘Who are these people and why are you gathering data on them in this fashion?’
‘Shhhh!’ Harley crouched down and waddled towards me across a lurid Mexican rug, his finger rammed hard against his lips. ‘Do keep your voice down, people might hear you.’
‘What people? What people might hear me?’ I expostulated. Harley was still crouching, or rather squatting in front of me. This posture rather suited him. With his sparse ginger beard and semi-pointed head he had always tended towards the garden gnomic.
‘The people who are coming for the meeting — the exclusionist group meeting.’
‘I see, I see. And these?’ I held up the computer paper.
Harley nodded, grinning. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’
Pleased? I was dumbfounded. I sat slumped in my chair for the next hour or so, saying nothing. During this period they trickled in. Quite ordinary upper-middle-class types. A mixed bunch, some professionals: lawyers, doctors and academics, all with the questing supercilious air that tends to go with thinking that you’re ‘in on something’. The professionals were mixed in with some wealthy women who trailed an atmosphere of having-had-tea at Browns or Fortnums behind them. All of these people milled around in the large room until they were called to order and the meeting began.
It was a strange affair, this ‘meeting’, solely concerned with procedure and administration. There was no content to it, or perceptible reason why this particular group of people should be gathered together. They discussed the revenue of the group, where they should meet, the provision of refreshments and a group trip to Glyndebourne that was happening in a couple of weeks’ time. At no point did anybody directly refer, or even allude, to what the purpose of the group was.
Eventually the meeting broke up into small groups of people who stood around talking. One of the women I had mentally tagged as ‘wealthy’ came and perched on the chair next to mine. She was middle-aged, svelte and smartly dressed in a suit of vaguely Forties cut. Her face had the clingfilm-stretched-over-cold-chicken look of an ageing woman who kept herself relentlessly in trim.
‘Who are you?’ she asked me, in a very forthright manner. Not at all like an English woman. ‘I haven’t seen you at a meeting before.’
‘Oh, just one of Harley’s colleagues. I came along to see what he was up to.’
‘Adam is a marvellous man. What he has achieved here in just three months deserves to be seen as the triumph that psychotherapy has been waiting for.’
‘Were you in therapy before coming to the group?’
‘Was I in therapy?’ She snorted. ‘Is Kenton a suburb? I have been in therapy of one form or another for the last ten years. I’ve had Freudian analysis, I’ve taken anti-depressants, subjected myself to eclectic psychotherapy, rebirthing. You name it — I’ve tried it. And let me tell you that not one of these things has helped me in the slightest. My neurosis has always managed to resurface, again and again.’
‘What form does this neurosis take?’
‘Any form it chooses. I’ve been bulimic and anorexic, claustrophobic and agoraphobic, alcoholic and hysterical, or just plain unhappy — all until the past three months. Since I joined Adam’s group my symptoms have simply melted away. I can’t even remember what it was that I was so upset about. I can only recall the tortuous self-analysis and introspection that went along with my various therapies as if it were some bad dream. The way I feel now is so completely different to the way I did feel that there is no comparison.’