ROSIE HAD MADE IT CLEAR TO SPIDER THAT SHE EXPECTED him to get a steady job, the kind that involved getting up in the morning and going somewhere.
So one morning, the day before Rosie was to be discharged from the hospital, Spider got up early and went down to the town library. He logged on to the library computer, sauntered onto the Internet and, very carefully, cleared out all Grahame Coats’s remaining bank accounts, the ones that the police forces of several continents had so far failed to find. He arranged for the stud farm in Argentina to be sold. He bought a small, off-the-peg company, endowed it with the money, and applied for charitable status. He sent off an e-mail, in the name of Roger Bronstein, hiring a lawyer to administer the foundation’s business, and suggested that the lawyer might wish to seek out Miss Rosie Noah, late of London, currently of Saint Andrews, and hire her to Do Good.
Rosie was hired. Her first task was to find office space.
Following this, Spider spent four full days walking (and, at nights, sleeping on) the beach that circled most of the island, tasting the food in each of the dining establishments he encountered along the way until he came to Dawson’s Fish Shack. He tried the fried flying fish, the boiled green figs, the grilled chicken, and the coconut pie, then he went back into the kitchen and found the chef, who was also the owner, and offered him money enough for partnership and cooking lessons.
Dawson’s Fish Shack is now a restaurant, and Mr. Dawson has retired. Sometimes Spider’s out front and sometimes he’s back in the kitchen: you go down there and look for him, you’ll see him. The food is the best on the island. He’s fatter than he used to be, though not as fat as he’ll wind up if he keeps tasting everything he cooks.
Not that Rosie minds.
She does some teaching, and some helping out, and a lot of Doing Good, and if she ever misses London she never lets it show. Rosie’s mother, on the other hand, misses London continually and vocally, but takes any suggestion that she might want to return there as an attempt to part her from her as-yet-unborn (and, for that matter, unconceived) grandchildren.
Nothing would give this author greater pleasure than to be able to assure you that, following her return from the valley of the shadow of death, Rosie’s mother became a new person, a jolly woman with a kind word for everyone, that her newfound appetite for food was only matched by her appetite for life and all if had to offer. Alas, respect for the truth compels perfect honesty and the truth is that when she came out of hospital Rosie’s mother was still herself, just as suspicious and uncharitable as ever, although significantly more frail and now given to sleeping with the light on.
She announced that she would be selling her flat in London and would move to wherever in the world Spider and Rosie were, to be near her grandchildren; and, as time went on, she would drop pointed comments about the lack of grandchildren, the quantity and motility of Spider’s spermatozoa, the frequency and positions of Spider and Rosie’s sexual relations, and the relative cheapness and ease of in vitro fertilization, to the point where Spider seriously began to think about not going to bed with Rosie anymore, just to spite Rosie’s mother. He thought about this for about eleven seconds one afternoon, while Rosie’s mother was handing them photocopies of an article from a magazine that she had found which suggested that Rosie should stand on her head for half an hour after sex; and he mentioned these thoughts to Rosie that night, and she laughed and told him that her mother wasn’t allowed in their bedroom anyway, and that she wasn’t going to be standing on her head after making love for anybody.
Mrs. Noah has a flat in Williamstown, near Spider and Rosie’s house, and twice a week one of Callyanne Higgler’s many nieces looks in on her, does the vacuuming, dusts the glass fruit (the wax fruit melted in the island heat), and makes a little food and leaves it in the fridge, and sometimes Rosie’s mum eats it and sometimes she doesn’t.
CHARLIE’S A SINGER THESE DAYS. HE’S LOST A LOT OF THE softness. He’s a lean man now, with a trademark fedora hat. He has lots of different fedoras, in different colors; his favorite one is green.
Charlie has a son. His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.