Evangelista's Fan by Rose Tremain

could rebuild it, make it whole again. She felt excited and hot. She thought: I have never had power over anything; this has been one of the uncontrovertible facts of my life.
    As the day passed and darkness filled the cracks in the shutters, Mercedes began to feel tired. She moved the anatomy book aside and laid her head on the table beside the pastry board. She put her hand inside her grey shirt and squeezed and massaged her nipple, and her head filled with dreams of herself as a girl, standing in the square, smelling the sea and smelling the mimosa blossom, and she fell asleep.
    She thought someone was playing a drum. She thought there was a march coming up the street.
    But it was a knocking on her door.
    She raised her head from the table. Her cheek was burning hot from lying directly under the light bulb. She had no idea whether it was night-time yet. She remembered the heart, almost finished, in front of her. She thought the knocking on her door could be Honorine coming to talk to her again and tell her she couldn’t go on living the way she was.
    She didn’t want Honorine to see the heart. She got up and draped a clean tea towel over it, as though it were a newly baked cake. All around the pastry board were crumbs of wax and used matches. Mercedes tried to sweep them into her hand and throw them in the sink. She felt dizzy after her sleep on the table. She staggered about like a drunk. She knew she’d been having beautiful dreams.
    When she opened her door, she saw a man standing there. He wore a beige mackintosh and a yellow scarf. Underneath the mackintosh, his body looked bulky. He wore round glasses. He said: ‘Mercedes?’
    She put a hand up to her red burning cheek. She blinked at him. She moved to close the door in his face, but he anticipated this and put out a hand, trying to keep the door open.
    â€˜Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘That’s the easy thing to do.’
    â€˜Go away,’ said Mercedes.
    â€˜Yes. OK. I will, I promise. But first let me in. Please. Just for ten minutes.’
    Mercedes thought: if I didn’t feel so dizzy, I’d be stronger. I’d be able to push him out. But all she did was hold onto the door and stare at him. Louis Cabrini. Wearing glasses. His curly hair getting sparse. His belly fat.
    He came into her kitchen. The book of human anatomy was still open on the table, next to the covered heart.
    He looked all around the small, badly lit room. From his mackintosh pocket, he took out a bottle of red wine and held it out to her. ‘I thought we could drink some of this.’
    Mercedes didn’t take the bottle. ‘I don’t want you here,’ she said. ‘Why did you come back to Leclos?’
    â€˜To die,’ he said. ‘Now, come on. Drink a glass of wine with me. One glass.’
    She turned away from him. She fetched two glasses and put them on the table. She closed the anatomy book.
    â€˜Corkscrew?’ he asked.
    She went to her dresser drawer and took it out. It was an old-fashioned thing. She hardly ever drank wine any more, except at Honorine’s. Louis put the wine on the table. ‘May I take my coat off?’ he said.
    Under the smart mackintosh, he was wearing comfortable clothes, baggy brown trousers, a black sweater. Mercedes laid the mackintosh and the yellow scarf over the back of a chair. ‘You don’t look as if you’re dying,’ she said, ‘you’ve got quite fat.’
    He laughed. Mercedes remembered this laugh by her side in her father’s little vegetable garden. She had been hoeing onions. Louis had laughed and laughed at something she’d said about the onions.
    â€˜I’m being melodramatic,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to die tomorrow. I mean that my life in Paris is over. I’m in Leclos now till I peg out! I mean that this is all I’ve got left to do. The rest is finished.’
    â€˜Everything finishes,’ said