The Crossword

Pilar Moreno had taught English in Malaga for thirty-four years, and in all that time she had never once managed to finish a cryptic crossword. She had tried, of course. Every summer some visiting British friend would leave a newspaper behind, folded open at the puzzle, and she would stare at clues like "Flower of London (6)" with the growing conviction that the English language was keeping a secret from her. The answer, she eventually learned, was THAMES, because a river is a thing that flows. She had found this less enlightening than infuriating.

When she retired and moved to Brighton, to a narrow apartment two streets from the sea and an hour by train from her daughter in London, she decided that the crossword would be her project. Other people took up painting or golf. Pilar would take up the puzzle in the Saturday Courier, a paper she bought from the newsagent on the corner chiefly because its crossword was said to be fiendish. Its setter signed every puzzle with a single word, Alumnus, which nobody at the newsagent's could explain.

The first months were humbling. She learned the grammar of the thing slowly, the way her own students had once learned the present perfect, with a mixture of resentment and dawning respect. Every clue, she discovered, was really two clues welded together: a plain definition at one end and a piece of wordplay at the other, joined so smoothly that the seam was almost invisible. "Mixed", "broken" and "wild" usually meant that letters were to be rearranged. "Initially" meant take the first letters. A "pound" was often just an L, and a "sailor" an AB.

What helped her most, oddly, was the thing she had spent her career teaching. She had always told her pupils that long English words were not monsters but buildings, put together from bricks that could be taken apart: a prefix here, a root in the middle, a suffix at the end. "Unbelievable" was "un" plus "believe" plus "able". "Disagreement" was three pieces of furniture in a trench coat. The setters of cryptic crosswords, it turned out, thought in exactly the same way. They took words apart for fun and hid the pieces in plain sight.

By the spring she was finishing the puzzle most weeks, usually by Sunday lunchtime, and that was when she noticed the clue. It was 14 across, and it read: "Support losing a pound, a teacher from Malaga (5)". She solved it almost at once and then sat very still at her kitchen table. A support was a PILLAR. Lose a pound, one L, and you were left with PILAR. Her name. A teacher. From Malaga.

She told herself it was a coincidence, the kind of thing that happens when a setter needs a five-letter word and Spanish names are useful. Crosswords were full of Spanish words; she had met PASEO, SIESTA and OLE more often than seemed decent. But the following Saturday there was another: "Cheater reformed, one who marks homework (7)". Cheater rearranged was TEACHER. On its own it meant nothing. Coming a week after the first, it felt like a hand on her shoulder.

Her daughter, consulted by phone, was frankly unconvinced. "Mama, there must be a thousand retired teachers reading that paper," she said. "You're seeing patterns because you want to." It was a reasonable argument, and Pilar, who had spent her career grading reasonable arguments, gave it full credit. Then she went back to the clues and the strange signature at the bottom of the grid. Alumnus. A Latin word, and one she knew perfectly well. It meant a former pupil.

Unable to let it go, she wrote to the paper. She chose her words with great care, aware that a letter beginning "I believe your crossword is talking to me" might not be taken seriously. She described herself, mentioned Malaga and the years she had taught there, and asked, with as much dignity as she could muster, whether the setter might ever have been a student of hers. Then she waited, and tried not to buy the paper too early on Saturdays, and failed.

The reply came three weeks later in a handwritten envelope. The setter was a man called Tomas Ruiz. He had been eleven when his family moved from Malaga to Manchester, and before that he had spent two years in her English class, at the back, by the window. He had been, he wrote, the boy who could not spell, the one other teachers had described to his parents as unteachable. She remembered him at once: small, furious, silent, with handwriting that looked like it was trying to escape from the page.

"You were the one who showed me that words come apart," he wrote. "You took the word unteachable and drew lines through it on the board, un, teach, able, and told me that if I could take a word to pieces, I could not be afraid of it. I have been taking words to pieces ever since. It is now, rather absurdly, my job." He had seen her name, he explained, on the list of new members of a Brighton book club that his sister belonged to, and had not known how else to say thank you except in the only language he was truly fluent in.

The following Saturday, Pilar did not wait until the afternoon. She bought the paper at seven, walked down to the seafront and sat on a bench with the wind trying to steal the pages. She found it at 1 down: "A cigars ruined: thanks in Malaga (7)". She did not need to count the letters. She wrote GRACIAS into the grid in neat capitals, the way she had once written model answers on a blackboard, and then she sat for a long time, watching the sea, with the pen still in her hand.