Hey Bob,

It had stopped at seventeen minutes past four.

Clara turned it over in her hand... an old silver pocket watch, heavier than it looked, the case gone soft at the edges from fifty years of somebody's thumb.

She was doing the thing you do after a funeral, which is going through a life in cardboard boxes and trying to decide what any of it meant.

Most of it means nothing. A drawer of keys that open no doors. Reading glasses in three strengths... (there are always reading glasses in three strengths.)

And then, at the back, this.

Not running. Not for a very long time... judging by the dust in the works.

Now, Clara is her grandfather's granddaughter, and she has never in her life left a closed thing closed. So she works the back of the case open with a fingernail.

Inside, folded down to almost nothing, there is a piece of paper.

It is a map. Pencil, hand drawn, worn furry along the folds... a route through the Pyrenees, up one side and down into Spain.

Under the map, three rules for crossing in winter, in handwriting she recognises before she has finished the first line, because it signed her birthday cards for thirty years.

And under the rules, three names.

One of them has been crossed out. Not tidily... gone over and over in black ink, hard enough to tear the paper.

Some context about Antonio, and this is the part that has stayed with me.

He was a punctual man. Almost comically so. Every evening he walked through the house checking the clocks, and if one of them was wrong, he corrected it. That was simply who he was.

So a stopped watch in his drawer is not an oversight. It is the one clock in his life he chose to leave showing the wrong time... for fifty years.

And he never talked about being young.

Not in the way that means there is not much to tell. In the other way.

Where a question gets an answer to a different question... and then there is more coffee... and the conversation has already moved on by the time you notice it turning.

Clara grew up knowing two things, in the way families know things without anybody ever sitting them down.

She knew that during the war, her grandfather had helped get people out of occupied France, over the mountains, into Spain.

And she knew that on one of those crossings, somebody did not arrive.

Nobody in her family has ever said his name out loud.

So she does what you or I would do... which is go there. To a village high enough that the road runs out, with a photograph of a map on her phone and a watch that does not work in her pocket, and she starts asking.

And about halfway through... she stops being certain she wants the answer.

Because what she is assembling, out of a parish register and a woman of ninety-four and a name somebody took the trouble to obliterate, is not the story she grew up inside.

It is starting to look as though the man who taught her to swim, and walked her down the aisle, left somebody on that mountain.

I am going to stop there.

That is roughly chapter two of eight, and I am not going to tell you what happened at seventeen minutes past four, because the whole of what I am about to offer you rests on the fact that you now want to know.

Which is the point I have been walking towards since yesterday.

The reason you cannot say anything interesting in Spanish is not that your Spanish is too small. It is that nothing has ever handed you something you badly wanted to say.

Give somebody a secret worth arguing about, and put them in a room with other people who read the same pages and reached a different conclusion... and something happens to their language that no amount of studying produces.

They stop constructing sentences... and start meaning them.

Tomorrow I will tell you exactly what we have built around this story, and who is teaching it.

It opens in the morning.

Olly

P.S. The story is called El Reloj de los Pirineos. It was written for this course, at a level you can genuinely read, by people who did not write it down to you.