Mouse In the Drawing Room

THE FACE OF INNOCENCE (253 pp.]--William Sansom -- Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Harry Camberly's best friend could not have awakened from his afternoon snooze at a more awkward moment. A scant 20 feet from his screening bamboo thicket, on a deserted white strand of Riviera beach, lay Harry's blonde wife Eve and a sinewy French mechanic, making love. Harry's friend squeezed his eyes shut, but his mind ticked on furiously. "How could Eve prostrate herself in that atrocious way! What lunatic filth presumed in that man's upstart mind to lay a finger on her!" Suddenly, he "felt like murder." Harry's friend might not have been so homicidally inclined if he weren't secretly in. love with Eve himself. As for poor old Harry, he was off pounding tennis balls somewhere while his wife played love sets on the beach.

Anyone expecting a crime of passion at this point reckons without the glacial restraint of modern British novelists. Author William Sansom muzzles the tiger in the blood in order to muster a conversational mouse in the drawing room. In The Face of Innocence, the crisp, angled light of his prose gives the mouse an exaggerated shadow. So does his main theme: that things are rarely what they seem.

Eve is no femme fatale, Harry is no fool, and Harry's friend (the nameless narrator of the story) is a retiring writer who wouldn't murder a flea except in print. Moreover, the scene on the Riviera beach is part of a cure, not a calamity.

A year before, when they married, the world at large took Harry and Eve for "a charming couple." But Harry soon realized that his wife had a dream life as real as her life with him, and twice as romantic. Her favorite myth: that her first and great love was a doomed young daredevil who took up a plane and crashed in flames.

Harry decides that Eve's is a case of innocence unhinged by a rage to live. Perhaps the Riviera will bring her out of her dreams. It does, of course, with the unexpected help of the French mechanic. He disappears into some wild blue yonder, leaving her with a child, and his casual farewell crashes all Eve's myths and completes her cure.

This comparatively happy ending seems more likable than likely. But then, Novelist Sansom's aromatic dish of climate and characters has not been cooked on the fierce front burner of profound truths anyway.

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