The Wistful Incense

The incense burned, and with it, the memory of him.

Eleanor stood in the drawing-room of the house on Kensington Church Street, though it had been three years since she had allowed anyone else to light the lamps there. The candles flickered, casting long shadows across the wallpaper that her husband—God, Henry, it had been Henry who had chosen that damnable damask—had selected from a shop near Oxford Street. The incense rose from the porcelain burner, thin blue threads that curled upward like ghosts seeking an exit from a room too small for them.

She did not smoke. She never had. But the scent of sandalwood and myrrh drew her, as though it carried something across the barrier between then and now, something that the ordinary air of London could not touch.

The first memory came unbidden, as these things always did: Henry's hands, stained with ink from the letters he wrote each evening to his mother in Derbyshire. He would sit at the mahogany desk by the window, the one that now held only a dust-collecting brass astrolabe Eleanor had bought at a Chelsea antique mart, and he would write with that fierce concentration that had first made her fall in love with him. The ink would smudge on his index finger, a blue crescent that he refused to wash away. "It's the mark of a man who thinks," he would say, winking across the candle between them at some restaurant in Soho where the wine was cheap and the conversation cheaper.

She closed her eyes. The incense thickened. The room narrowed to a single point of light.

The second memory arrived like a stranger knocking at an unfamiliar door: the morning at St. Pancras, the fog so thick that the station pillars dissolved into gray pillars of nothing, and Henry pulling her coat tight around her shoulders with hands that were warm despite the chill of that London November. He was leaving for Berlin. Not forever, he said. Not forever. The train announcement crackled overhead in a voice that sounded almost human, almost sorry, and he kissed her forehead, lingering there as though imprinting the temperature of his lips onto her skin.

"I'll send you the coordinates," he said. "Every city, every street corner where the light falls the same way it falls here, and you'll know I'm thinking of you."

She had laughed. Oh, how she had laughed, because the idea of him sending her the coordinates of foreign cities in postcards that would take weeks to arrive was so absurdly romantic, so characteristically Henry, that it made her chest ache with something between joy and foreboding.

The train whistle blew. He disappeared into the fog the way people disappear in dreams—suddenly, completely, leaving you with the aftermath of their presence and no clear memory of how they went.

Eleanor opened her eyes. The incense had burned down to a thin wire of ash, trembling on the edge of the porcelain dish. She reached out to steady it, her fingers trembling, and caught herself. She was forty-seven years old. She had spent three years learning how to breathe without him without feeling like her lungs had forgotten their purpose. She was not a girl at a station in a fog. She was not anyone's widow. She was Eleanor Vane, retired curator of the Whitworth's minor collections, woman who bought her own wine and lit her own candles and walked alone through the galleries on Tuesday mornings when the tourists were at home and the Impressionists were hers alone.

But the incense—

The incense was his.

She remembered the apartment in Dahlem, the one with the radiator that clanked like a dying engine and the window that faced only the back of another building, another life, another woman ironing shirts in a room that smelled of starch and resignation. Henry had sent her a postcard from there, though she had never seen it. She knew this because he wrote in his letters—those beautifully inked, fiercely honest letters—that he was thinking of her while he sat in that apartment, that the clanking radiator sounded like the kettle on their kitchen counter in Belsize Park, that he wished he could hear her singing in the next room, off-key and unaware.

She had kept every letter. Of course she had kept every letter. Who throws away the physical evidence that someone loved you? She had stored them in a hatbox—Henry's old Homburg, the one with the sweatband still marked with the initials of the haberdasher on Jermyn Street—and placed the hatbox under her bed, where it gathered dust and memories in equal measure.

The third memory was a secret memory, one she had never written down or spoken aloud: the night before the wedding, when she had stood in this very drawing-room, the one with the damask wallpaper and the Persian rug that Henry had bargained for in Borough Market like a man possessed, and she had lit a candle and whispered to the empty air a single sentence that she had never told him. "I am afraid," she had said. "I am afraid of being happy, because I know it will end, and I know I will blame myself when it does."

The air had said nothing. The candle had burned. The morning had come.

Eleanor stood and walked to the window. Kensington Gardens lay beyond it, dark and glistening in the drizzle that London wore like a second skin. She thought of Berlin, of the apartment in Dahlem, of the radiator that clanked. She thought of all the cities Henry had never sent her the coordinates of, all the streets he had walked alone that she had walked here, parallel but separate, the way two threads on a loom move up and down without ever crossing.

The incense burned lower.

The fourth memory came last, as these things always do—the one you save for the end because it is the one that will break you or make you, and you know it from the moment it arrives: the last letter. Not the last letter he wrote—she knew that one, the one in Berlin that never arrived because Henry's handwriting grew fainter and the words shorter and the ink thinner, as though the man himself were evaporating, molecule by molecule, into the gray light of a German winter. No, the last letter was from the hospital in Hampstead, the one written in a hand she barely recognized because the writer was not Henry but a woman named Margaret who introduced herself as "a friend of Henry's from the university" and who wrote in careful, precise English that she was sorry and that Henry had asked for her and that Eleanor should come because Henry had said her name three times in the hour before—

Eleanor had not gone.

She told herself it was because the train from Kensington took too long and Henry would have wanted her to rest. She told herself it was because she was not ready to see him like that, diminished, the man who had once carried her over the threshold of their first flat now reduced to bones and tubes and the pale shine of a hospital room. She told herself many things, most of them elegant and plausible and designed to make the truth hurt less.

The truth was simpler and crueler: she was afraid. Not of seeing him diminished—though that was part of it—but of seeing him alive, present, real, and knowing that the life she had built, the life of galleries and Tuesday mornings and independent wine-buying, was a life he did not want. He wanted the damask wallpaper and the Persian rug and the incense and the singing off-key in the next room. He wanted the ordinary miracle of a shared kitchen and a clanking radiator and ink-stained fingers. He wanted her. And she, standing in this drawing-room three years later, burning sandalwood and myrrh because she could not bear the silence of an empty house, was still not sure she had wanted him back.

The incense ended.

Eleanor stood in the dark room for a long time, listening to the sound of the city outside—the buses that hissed on their brakes, the distant wail of a siren, the murmur of someone's radio bleeding through an open window somewhere on Church Street. She thought of Henry's letters in the hatbox under her bed. She thought of Berlin. She thought of the woman named Margaret who had written to say that Henry had said her name.

She walked to the hatbox. She took it out. She opened the Homburg and removed the stack of letters, bound with twine and stamped with the postmarks of a life that had happened to someone else. She carried them to the drawing-room and set them on the mahogany desk by the window, the one that still held the brass astrolabe she had bought at Chelsea.

The incense burner sat empty now, its porcelain dish cool to the touch. She took the letters and, one by one, she placed them in the dish. The paper curled at the edges when it touched the warmth still lingering from the burnt incense. She did not light a candle. She did not need to. The room was bright enough with memory, with the accumulated luminance of a thousand small moments that had added up to something vast and unnameable and gone.

She sat at the desk. She picked up a pen from the drawer—Henry's pen, the cheap blue biro from the tube station at Victoria that he had bought on a whim and refused to replace because "it writes like a dream, Ellie, don't you agree?"—and she began to write.

Not to his mother. Not to a friend in Berlin. To Henry, in the way that the dead can receive letters, in the way that love reaches across the barrier between then and now, in the way that sandalwood smoke rises and dissolves into the air and becomes, for a moment, the shape of something you can almost hold.

"I was afraid," she wrote. "I was afraid of being happy. I was afraid of seeing you in that hospital. I was afraid of the incense and the letters and the clanking radiator and the way you laughed at postcards that described cities I would never see. But you know what? I was also happy. I was happy in the drawing-room with the damask wallpaper and the Persian rug and the singing off-key. I was happy in the kitchen with the ink-stained fingers and the cheap wine and the conversations that went nowhere and everywhere. I was happy, Henry, and I know that doesn't make up for the fear, but it's the truth, and I think you deserve the truth, even now, even like this."

She signed her name. Ellie. Not Eleanor. Ellie. The name he had given her, the name he had whispered in the dark, the name that lived in the space between breath and memory where nothing else could reach.

She placed the letter on top of the others in the porcelain dish. She lit a new stick of incense. She watched it burn. She waited for the reply.