‘Where shall I put this, Stella?’ Charlotte crouched next to her friend. She touched Stella’s arm to get her attention, a butterfly kiss with her fingertips.

Stella took one hand from under the throw across her knees. She reached out and stroked the object with a bent, arthritic finger. She didn’t speak.

‘What is it for?’ Charlotte turned the item upside-down, looking for clues.

It seemed to be a slim vase; the kind made for a single stem. It wasn’t heavy and although it had dulled with years of tarnish, patches glowed like flame in the low autumn sunlight. Perhaps it was copper. Charlotte ran her thumb over a relief on what she assumed was the front of the vase. She couldn’t make out the picture. Her reading glasses were in her handbag.

‘Incense,’ said Stella.

The pause had been so long Charlotte had forgotten she’d asked a question. For a moment she wondered what Stella had smelt.

‘No. Soap, I think, Stella,’ she said.

Stella pulled her other hand from beneath her throw and curled it round the slim cone of the vase. With her hooked finger she pointed imprecisely to the opening at the top and said, ‘In here. Incense.’

Charlotte caught up. ‘Where did you get it?’ She was cautious with the question. She treasured these moments when her friend came back to her, but they were fleeting and often unreliable.

Stella made a tiny growling noise in the back of her throat, like a car engine spluttering into life on a frosty morning. ‘I was given it by a herdsman in Peru.’

Charlotte patted Stella’s arm and tried to hide her disappointment with a smile. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, taking the vase. ‘Shall we get the rest of your things unpacked? This is a cosy room, isn’t it? I think you’ll be happy and well-looked after here, Stella.’

Charlotte busied herself with a box, folding the bubble wrap as she uncovered Stella’s belongings.

‘The air was so pure; it was like breathing Heaven. The mountains sparkled under the moon, and the cold bit like pepper in my nose. It made me sneeze.’ Stella chuckled to herself.

‘Hmmm,’ said Charlotte, examining the one-eared china dog she’d just unearthed. She pondered what had made Stella hold on to it. It had a friendly face, she thought. She placed it on the windowsill.

Stella continued with her storytelling. ‘It was warm inside the hut, and dark. I remember the smoke. It wasn’t from the fire but from the incense. Such an exotic smell, like nothing I’d known before. For protection they told me, for the mother and her child.’

Charlotte had just found some sort of journal when Stella gripped the blanket on her knee, bunched it in her gnarled hands, and brought it up to her face.

‘Are you alright?’ Charlotte put the book down in a hurry and went to Stella. The book fell off the edge of the table.

Stella was smiling. ‘There were blankets. All colours, a kaleidoscope of patterns spilling across the floor. My sight became accustomed to the gloom, and I could just make her out in the corner. She was on a mattress, surrounded by women singing softly. She was beautiful. Her hair was like black, molten glass pouring over her shoulder, and her eyes were amber beads in the firelight. After I’d helped deliver the baby. That’s when he gave it to me. To thank me for keeping her safe, and for bringing their son into that magical, starlit night.’

Charlotte picked up the book, along with some bits of paper that had scattered from it. She sat in the chair next to Stella and took her hand. It felt soft and crepey. ‘That’s a lovely story, Stella,’ she said, smiling at her friend’s imagination. ‘Shall I go and find out what time lunch is?’

Charlotte stood up and put the book on the table. She opened it and tucked the pieces of paper back inside.

If she’d had her readers on, she would have noticed that the scraps of paper were photographs. She would have gazed in astonishment at a young Stella sitting cross-legged in a hut, and next to her, a herdsman, his beautiful wife and newborn baby. She could have read the faint pencil on the back of the photograph — Volunteering with the Red Cross. Peru, Sept. ’58. She might have re-examined the vase and seen the relief of a llama and a caped figure. She might even have brought the incense holder to her nose, imagined the unfamiliar scent, and the adventures that had brought this extraordinary item into her friend’s possession. She would have hugged Stella in admiration. She would have sat down and said, ‘Tell me more. Tell me the life you’ve lived.’

But Charlotte’s glasses were in her handbag, and so she didn’t do or say any of those things. Instead, she went in search of the dining room to enquire about lunch.

Stella, meanwhile, hummed to herself, remembering a long-ago September as though it was yesterday.