The stories are usually told by travelers, since they better than most can surrender to the whims of the transitory and accept all salvation as their due. Indeed, perhaps she only appears to those who never sought her, nor, having encountered her, care afterwards to remain on her account. Sometimes she seduces the men who pass through the valley beneath Broken Arbour; sometimes, on the contrary, she herself seems to be the one who gets seduced. But all the stories begin and end late at night in a bar or in the clatter of a station platform or at the busy place where two streets divide, as though it were only possible to remember that dark-haired woman as an afterthought; like pictures in a twisted mirror, her foreshortened image is limited to the superfluous, short-lived splinters pared from the shapes of more memorable events, simultaneously sustained and rejected by them, both definitive and uncertain, provocative and sad. Depending on nothing, she comes to you from nowhere; she smiles at you; she takes you by the hand; she begins to lead you somewhere ... But then the bell clangs, the doors are closed, and everyone stumbles off in different directions; the train moves away, and the junction, spliced to pieces by its traffic, whirls apart obliviously like confetti on the breeze.

For myself, I had no reason to heed the stories; they were narrated by travelers, anyway, and, without questioning their basic veracity, I therefore thought of them as little more than general extensions of the exotic baggage their progenitors brought with them from beyond the hills - a set of intriguing but non-transferable verbal goods that any rational man would dismiss as swiftly as the landlady changed their sheets. Perhaps it is for this reason that several years passed before I finally took out the ticket I had won at a hand of cards. Maybe someone had staked it with lewd humour; maybe, on the contrary, it was the only thing left of any value. But, whatever the circumstances, doubtless the irony is not lost on a woman remembered in passing that I won my letter of introduction to her in a bar whose name I have forgotten, from men and women who have long since moved away to poorer, more profitable towns.

Broken Arbour. The name was not short of meaning; it was only significance that it lacked, as if that too had been a victim of the storms that swept through its trellises one autumn, rechristening it with a new, exemplary name in impetuous recompense for the destructive force with which it whirled other, older names away. For it wasn't always called Broken Arbour, although no one seems to remember what it was called before. Today, the arbour in question belongs to an old colonial motel on the outskirts of the village, and while the words “broken” and “arbour” may have little natural association, they fit together perfectly when presented with the spectacle of that disheveled, slantwise sprawl of a place. In fact the ramshackle arcade seems a natural extension of the house, even if it’s entirely possible its lopsided trellises were only put up out of magnanimity, so that Broken Arbour – the place – could at last mean something definitive, and thereby earn the right to be forgotten, just like its predecessor. Then again, maybe it sprang from a more selfish desire to concentrate the spirit of the place just there, at the motel, so that all who sought its meaning would be compelled to stay within its walls.

Whatever the reason, the name now has a referent, and, despite its desuetude, you can still pass through that referent from the house into the garden. But after that the path strikes out over uneven ground; it wanders through scrubland past cairns and gorse bushes and eventually joins the old logging trails that no longer go anywhere remarkable, since they have guided too well and for too long, and the rich forests to which they once led have long since been pulped and shipped elsewhere.

Looking at the driver, I tried in vain to follow the pair of eyes that had been fixed since birth on the curves and descents of the road ahead; like the logging trails, they no longer rewarded scrutiny and their destination was only a different kind of absence, worn away to nothing by the daily attrition of that gaze. As I did so, I realised it was precisely this indifferent world that was driving me at last into the ambivalent embrace of Broken Arbour and whatever beginning or end of a thing awaited me there; it was precisely this indifferent, superannuated world, in which most paths led nowhere, every story was interrupted, and the names of people and places were forgotten, that I would pay any price to escape.

Ultimately it was just the two of us who dismounted, but by then the bus was almost empty, anyway. The other passenger was an aged woman who immediately started to walk back down the road toward the city. Above me, against the night sky, there were a few houses, their dusty, cracked windows covered with chicken wire, and the sagging walls held up with lean-to planks or piles of stones. Then there was a shop which had been boarded up, followed by a broken-windowed church and a large pile of rubble with the stringy remnants of a tarpaulin still pinned down with bricks. To the left, a side track branched away on a camber over the hillside, circuiting a couple of gorges caused by recent landslides, before it ended at a wooden building with an empty sign guard, which I took to be the motel. As I walked along it, I could see deep into the valley, but was disturbed to find I kept catching glimpses of the woman who had disembarked with me further and further down the hill. Had she come here by accident, or nodded off? Or did she, even now, know where she was going?

I opened the door; behind it was an empty desk with a bell and a large stack of papers someone was evidently in the process of tearing to pieces. Then there was the sound of firm, unhurried steps along a corridor nearby, and a grey-haired woman entered the office and glanced at me without surprise.

“How long are you staying?” she asked brusquely. “One night, or more than one night?”

I told her that I would be gone tomorrow. The woman then quoted a price which seemed exorbitant for the location and the standard of service I might reasonably expect to receive there, but I paid it without comment, and she returned to the paperwork on the table, as if there were nothing further to discuss.

“Which room am I in?” I asked at last.

“Any one,” she said shortly.

“Can I have a key, please?” Evidently irritated by the request, she reached without looking toward the shelf above her and took down a set of keys.

“The room must be vacated by ten a.m,” she added automatically. But I saw that her apparent resolve was in fact some kind of emotional agitation, and as she put the keys in my hand, she held her own there a long time.

“Be …” she began, looking at me intently, as if trying to find the best way to put it. “Be … be faithful.” The word seemed so fanciful that I smiled in despite of myself; but she was not smiling, and my smile fast retreated into its own shadow, as if only there could it hide from the things it should not have seen and she should not have said. Now she drew her hands together before her, since there were something behind them that she wanted to protect, and that would be hurt by whatever it was that I signified.

“You do understand,” she concluded quietly, “You do understand, grace may not arrive until the last hour, and maybe even the last minute of the last hour?”

“I understand.”

“The bar is open all day, though. Good night.”

I walked over to the verandah and down the steps. It was dusk; the colours of the garden had almost drained away into the languid lemon and blue of the horizon. Slowly I wandered across the unkempt lawn, beneath the broken arbour whose meaning eluded me now, and probably always would. Abruptly I realised, almost in passing, that the answer to anything could never bring me peace, and that this was why I had lived with questions for so long. I didn’t care who or what arrived at the tenth or the eleventh hour; I didn’t care if it was my destiny to wander forever through that neglected garden, for the world was too wide to encompass; at least I had the consolation that my fate was individual within it.

“Is the world really so small that a woman can’t walk naked within it any longer?” someone said softly, as if in deliberate contradiction. And I saw that indeed a woman was standing there, in the arbour, quite naked.

"I'm Grace," she added, extending her hand candidly. The simplicity of the movement seemed to conceal her better than any clothing might have done; but it could not conceal her entirely, and as I shook her hand I felt her spirit, clear and strong and unperturbed, flowing from a kind of sensitivity in her wrists, as if she had been a harp-player or a ballerina once.

“You’re staying here?” I said.

“No. I live here.”

“You live here?”

“With my mother, yes.”

“Then it was your mother who said you wouldn’t arrive till the eleventh hour,” I began, understanding suddenly why the room had been so expensive and the grey haired woman had had so little interest in small talk.

“So that’s why you’ve come …” she said expressionlessly. Without thinking, I had dropped my eyes. The long line of her pubis – half hair and half shadow - was neither beautiful nor ugly; its unassertive functionality arrested my attention without provoking any particular desire.

“Always that,” she declared dryly. The rebuke came so swiftly I realised she must have been waiting for that glance of mine, having anticipated it from the start. “Very soon it won’t seem so mysterious. Maybe you’ll even catch the last bus home tonight?”

With conscious dignity she started to walk back toward the house; following her automatically with my eyes, the image of a fire-fly came into my head – darting, short-lived and without focus.

Suddenly aware that I could do anything, and that I was not obliged to act, I forced myself to try to see beyond the secure, proud tranquility of the woman before me, whose dim profile I still caught snatches of, left and right, as it retreated among the ragged branches. Yet with that turning away, not only sight but strength and purpose together struggled in the darkening garden, and all I could feel clearly was the comfort of the space into which her name had fallen; everything else led nowhere, like the descent from the lip of cup. Perhaps she and her name had wandered for a time; perhaps they too had even been vulnerable once, in their incapacity to shield or give form to one another. But here, in the protective nakedness of this quiet gully, she and her name had become equals; they had achieved one another, and I knew, from the purposeful, delicate peace I had sensed in her handshake, that at Broken Arbour and among the short-lived tales of travelers she had found her final resting place.

“I would call you in,” she said, glancing back, “but you’ll come if you want to.” Then, as if the observation were connected to her previous sentence, she added, this time without turning: “A lot of things have been forgotten.” But whatever those things were, they failed to concern her, and she took no personal responsibility for them

Below me, in the valley, perhaps the old woman I had seen was still pressing onward to her own mysterious destination. If she were, that destination had already become nonsensical, since no travail could make sense of the effort it had required; if she were to reach it, she would reach it in despite of her resources; or else it must rise up to meet her half-way. But at what point exactly, I reflected, does compromise become a deficiency of faith, and perseverance the mere practice of futility? Either way, this was no place to go walking without water, even after sunset, and if walking she still were, then the only way she would reach her destination was in a box. If walking she still were - the thought circled me a second time, as if to confirm I had noticed it - then I envied her the proximity of her destiny; I envied her the assurance with which it pushed itself to the fore and wrapped itself about her. For she and I were different. I could go wandering where I chose, and I half wished the summer night could strip me of my life as easily as it could she of hers. My time was yet to come; I had stepped on too many people’s toes, I pondered. Destiny and I were fairly matched, and we would take each other by the throat, for there would be no easy salvation for either of us that day, but much gasping and writhing in the dust. I clenched my teeth and let the breath out tenderly, as if to avoid perturbing the petals of a flower; I had long since served my lack of a purpose, and all that remained was dissimulation; shouldn’t it be better to have that struggle now, and be done with it?

A part of me longed for the nameless, unanswerable night through which the old woman was walking with such naked and inscrutable purposefulness, for the poise of that bleak, inscrutable hillside far from any memory. But there was no light to see by except the few incidental stars, and on a grey, common night like this humanity was without purchase, and had no means to detain her. Perhaps it was only as something more primeval and therefore more eternal than the human that I could track her, searching on the varying breeze for the primitive smell of her, the scent of urine and the mingling of different forms of sweat, listening for the perturbation of her feet with ears folded forward and unblinking, yellow eyes. I didn’t know if I would find her hollowed out in a ditch, or curled up in her own clothes, exhausted, like something that had been hurled from a car. But if I could find her, then I could prevent the stumbling that was her life from stumbling once too far, even if the small window would scarcely shine brighter for the extra time I bought it to behold the day - indeed, I wasn’t convinced the picture within it would change much, from whichever end of time you chose to pare away its days.

Slowly I reentered the house, not knowing what decision I had made, or even if one had been made for me within the absence of the garden. A clock was chiming, clearly and precisely, at the other end of the building. It did not matter; I had no obligation to know my future in this place; it was sufficient that I recognised the event through which it would become a choice, as either I reentered the greyness of the old woman’s night within the garden, or continued forward toward the blindness which began in the room at the end of the corridor, a room whose furnishings I suspected were varied and comforting, whose plaster and picture rails and windows extended far into the future, but all of which, I also knew, became inescapable once the door had been closed behind them. The proprietress was seated at the desk with her pile of half torn papers and the little table lamp, all exactly as it had been before, as if nothing had changed. But I fancied she looked a little more weary, a little more like Grace’s mother than the keeper of an office she refused to acknowledge. As if conscious of my struggle, “You are furthest from grace the instant you entertain the possibility you have earned it,” she said compassionately, but without offering to bear any part of that burden herself on my account: “It would be better for you, at that time, if you had never learned the word.”

Now I vaguely felt that perhaps grace and salvation, in her speech, were the same thing, and that the space of glory was entirely equivalent to the implicit affirmation with which it might be won. Suspecting an interdict had been cast in the air before me, I paused and tentatively touched the wiry, smoke-filled penumbra that appeared in constant motion and constant harmony, like a sheeny curtain of daggers across the entrance to the corridor. But, upon closer examination, I found that the words did not oppose me; they did not assert themselves, even if, at the same time, it was impossible to overlook the fact they had been said. Most of their meaning, in fact, was directed backward toward the proprietress like a kind of nostalgia; a small and private part was also intended for me alone; but the words meant nothing in and for themselves; they were an illusive covering about either nothing or nothing in particular, and I parted their misty fronds as easily as I might have walked through the softly corded tresses of a waterfall into the untenable, liquid space of the cave beyond them. I looked down, picking my way gently over the steps of those who had preceded me, picking my way over their hesitations and false turns, even as I might pick my way over the hesitations and false turns of those who wandered on the hillside or in the valley below me. As I did so, perhaps I confused and ruined a lifetime of earlier routes; or perhaps my own trail, in all its cynicism, would some day guide another lost upon the hills to the same conclusion, and thereby make me responsible for his errance, and cause me to become answerable to him. It was only as I turned the handle of the door that I realised that there were not two choices, but only one, and Grace was the reward – or something to do with her was a part of the choice I had not taken. Then I had to turn my head, for the filthy, blinding air, full of faeces, broken promises and pieces of old books. At a distance the shaking windows were open on the night, beyond which a formless, refluxing flesh, like thickened milk, was surging in some primitive kind of procreation at the foot of the valley.