He felt the chill wind raising his hairline even more, wished he'd worn his stylish new Homburg. She was playing with his mind again. Sometimes it was difficult to sleep.
'We could ask him if you were right. That he really did want to get out of Bridelow. That he would've had no objections at all to Gannons taking over the brewery. Give your mother something to think about.'
'I'd rather not, if you don't mind,' Shaw said. He was thinking about last summer, a warm day in August, when he'd found out about another side of Therese.
Over dinner one night in Manchester, he'd giggled nervously and said to her, 'You know, I'm beginning to think you must be some sort of vampire, only ever corning out at night.'
'Would you like that - if I was a vampire?'
'I don't know. What would it mean?'
'I could make you undead, couldn't I?'
'Er ... haven't you got to be dead before you can be undead?'
She'd put down her glass and looked at him, red wine glistening on her lips, face still and golden in the moving candlelight, like a mask from some Egyptian tomb.
'And what,' she said, 'makes you think you aren't?' And he began to shake with desire, a new kind of desire which began at the bottom of his spine.
But he'd kept on at her in the car - it was a Range Rover this time, belonging, she said, to a friend - as she whizzed them down Deansgate around 1 a.m. What did she do at weekends, in the daytime? Social work, she said.
'Social work?'
And it was true; two days later they were out on the moors. He was following Therese in gloriously tight jeans and there were two friends called Rhona and Rob and a bunch of
people Therese described loosely as 'offenders'.
Rhona, who was quite attractive, despite having a sort of crewcut, was apparently a professional social worker with the local authority. Rob, a lean, hard-looking man, was - amazingly - a policeman, a detective sergeant. You had to admire her cheek, being friends with a copper after all the cars and things she'd stolen.
They'd parked their vehicles in a long lay-by off the Sheffield road and after two hours of hard walking, Shaw's legs were starting to ache.
'Where are we going exactly?'
'Not far now,' Therese assured him. The six 'offenders', who were of both sexes and ranged in age from teens to about sixty, were fairly silent the whole way.
After a further few minutes, Therese stopped. They were on a kind of plateau, offering a magnificent view of miles of sunlit moorland and, more distantly, a huge expanse of darkness which he assumed was the Moss, with the hills behind it reaching up to Kinder Scout.
'Gosh, look,' Shaw said, 'there's the Bridelow road. We've come a hell of a long way round. If we'd just gone through the churchyard and carried on up the moor we'd have been up here in about half an hour.'
'It was better to come this way,' Therese said. 'Don't whinge, Shaw.'
There were stubby stones around where she was standing, arranged in a rough sort of circle, or maybe an egg-shape; it was hard to tell, they were so overgrown.
One of the older offenders was on his knees. He was probably exhausted. He had his arms around one of the bigger stones, a thing about two and a half feet high, and he seemed
to be kissing it.
'What sort of offenders are they?' Shaw whispered.
'Just people who society considers maladjusted,' Therese said. 'It's stupid. They all have special qualities nobody seems to want to recognize.'
Rob said, 'We're helping to rehabilitate them.'
Therese had taken a few objects from her backpack - odd things, photographs in frames, a small pair of trainers, a large penknife - and arranged them around the circle, up against the stones.
They had a rough sort of picnic outside the circle of stones, with a whole cooked chicken, which everybody pulled bits off, and red wine. Afterwards, they all sat around in the springy yellow grass, not talking, the sun going down, Shaw starting to feel a little drunk, a little sleepy.
He was aware that Rob and Rhona had entered the circle and were murmuring to themselves in low voices. They seemed to have taken all their clothes off. They began to touch each other and then to have sex. Shaw was deeply shocked but kept quiet about it. It went on for some time. Until suddenly, dreamily, a plump, spotty, middle-aged woman called Andrea stood up and joined Rob and Rhona in the circle and began to behave as though there were some other people in there too.
'Hello, David,' she said joyfully, the first time she'd spoken all afternoon. 'All right, Kevin?'
She giggled. 'Yes,' she said. 'Me too. Do you like it here? It's nice, isn't it?'
At that stage Rhona and Rob left her and came out and sat with Therese and Shaw. Flies and midges buzzed around Andrea in the dusk. Shaw seemed to fall asleep. When he awoke he saw Andrea on her knees in the circle with her arms around what looked like two dusty shadows.
'Isn't it heart-warming?' Therese was whispering, as if they were watching a weepy from the back stalls. 'She's becoming reconciled to the loss of her brothers.'
'What happened to them?'
'They died,' Therese said. 'A long time ago. She killed them. With a penknife. They were only little. 'Course she was only a child herself. It was such a shame, they put her away for a long time.'
He didn't remember how they got back to the cars except that it was dark by then and it didn't seem to take nearly as long as it had taken them to get to the circle.
In the churchyard, Therese said, 'Is she here - your mother?'
'No, she ... she thinks she's got that Taiwanese flu. I've tendered her apologies.'
'Funny, isn't it, the way she won't come into Bridelow?
'She should leave. She's no connections here.'
'Why won't she leave?'
'I don't know,' Shaw said, but he did. His mother couldn't bear to be supplanted by Therese. His mother did not like Therese. This was understandable. Sometimes he wasn't
sure that the word 'like' precisely conveyed his own feelings.
Her dark hair, swept back today, was mostly inside the collar of the fur coat. She wore a deep purple lipstick.
Nor, he thought, was 'love' appropriate. So why ...
Therese nodded back towards the village. Shaw looked his watch: three minutes to four, and the light was weakening.
... why ...
Therese said, 'It's coming.' Meaning the funeral procession.
Shaw shuddered again, with a cold pleasure that made him afraid of her and of himself.
'You know,' Therese said, 'I think it's time you met father. Properly.'
'Is he dead?' Shaw asked fearfully.
CHAPTER V