its probably most pracitcal for your to use 3 dimensional array, consider
(my.array<-array(1:(4*3*2),dim=c(4,3,2)))
, , 1
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 1 5 9
[2,] 2 6 10
[3,] 3 7 11
[4,] 4 8 12
, , 2
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 13 17 21
[2,] 14 18 22
[3,] 15 19 23
[4,] 16 20 24