Free Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

were four different kinds of jam.
    Belinda enjoyed her tea quietly while Harriet and the Count talked. Every time they visited Ricardo’s house, Belinda was struck by the excellence of everything in it. The house itself was an interesting continental-looking building with a tower at one end and balconies and window-boxes, filled at all times of the year with suitable flowers. And the garden was delightful, with its perfectly tended herbaceous borders and rockeries, a grove of lime trees and some fine Lombardy poplars. The joys of the vegetable garden, too, were considerable. Belinda wondered how anybody could remain unmoved at the sight of the lovely marrows, and the magnificent pears, carefully tied up in little cotton bags, so that they should not fall before they were ripe or be eaten by the birds. At the bottom of the vegetable garden was a meadow, which Ricardo had planted with such of his native Italian flowers as could be induced to grow in the less sunny English climate. This part of the garden was his especial delight, and on fine evenings he would sit for hours in a deck-chair reading Tacitus or Dante, or brooding over the letters of his friend John Akenside.
    This afternoon he was anxious that they should see a fine show of Michaelmas daisies, eight different varieties, each one a different colour and one a particularly rare one, which he had brought back from the south of France, when he was there in the spring. And he was thinking of having a pond made, for water-lilies and goldfish, and where did Harriet think would be the best place to have it?
    ‘Oh, Ricardo, how lovely!’ said Harriet, in raptures at the thought of the pond. ‘Will you swim in it? If it had a nice concrete bottom it would be quite clean, and so romantic to swim in the moonlight with the fishes.’
    Belinda shivered. The fishes would be so cold and slimy and besides, Ricardo didn’t do romantic things like that. ‘Leigh Hunt writes rather charmingly about a fish’, she said aloud, ‘ Legless, unloving, infamously chaste ’; she paused. Perhaps it was hardly suitable, really, and she was a little ashamed of having quoted it, but these little remembered scraps of culture had a way of coming out unexpectedly.
    ‘Swans would be nice,’ Harriet went on, ‘or would they eat the fishes?’
    Ricardo was uncertain, but said that he had thought of getting some peacocks, they would look so effective on the terrace.
    Harriet agreed that they would, and they moved off together, leaving Belinda bending over the Michaelmas daisies. She did not want to listen to another proposal of marriage and probably a refusal as well. It was some months since Ricardo had last proposed to Harriet and Belinda could feel that another offer was due.
    When they came back to the house she could tell that he had once more been disappointed. It seemed a suitable time to talk about Ricardo’s old friend John Akenside, and how he must miss him, even after all these years.
    Yes, indeed, Ricardo wondered at times whether his own end was near. Would Belinda come into his study and see the photograph which he meant to have as the frontispiece to his long-awaited edition of the letters of John Akenside?
    They went into the house, leaving Harriet to collect some plants from the gardener.
    Ricardo’s study gave the impression that he was a very studious and learned man. The walls were lined with very dull-looking books and the large desk covered with papers and letters written in faded ink. His task of collecting and editing the letters of his friend took up most of his time now, and it was doubtful whether he read anything but a few lines of Dante or a sentence of Tacitus.
    A large photograph of John Akenside stood in a prominent position on the desk, showing him in some central European court dress. He looked uncomfortable in the white uniform and faintly ridiculous, like something out of a musical comedy. Perhaps his collar was crooked or the row of medals too ostentatious