Design for Living

LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE (304 pp.]--Nancy Mitford--Random House--($2.75).

British Nancy Mitford's bestselling Pursuit of Love, published three years ago, especially pleased two groups of U.S. readers: 1) heartthrob hunters who panted with pleasure over Pursuit's hot Paris romance; 2) determined esthetes who gleefully bang their teacups whenever the sharp, wry tongue of their cult leader, Evelyn Waugh, wags through a new writer's prose. Group One will shiver in dry-eyed disappointment over Love in a Cold Climate, Miss Mitford's hot-weather novel for 1949. Group Two will fare better--if they can take their Waugh watered.

Grade A lords & ladies, driving their Daimlers and hunting the fox halfway in time between two world wars, swarm all over this chatty, rambling book. Lavish Hampton Park in western England, home of one of Britain's richest, noblest families, is their weekend headquarters. There, hostess Lady Montdore whips them through their social paces and screens the bachelors who swarm around her daughter. Polly Montdore at 19 is more beautiful than all the priceless Hampton oil paintings put together--and colder than a Highlands wind. When the man of her choice is free to marry, she does her own proposing, pouncing on a social-climbing old rake who had won her heart by pinching her at 14. She gets her man but loses her fortune: the elder Montdores strike her from their will and seem to plummet, from shock, into old age. Author Mitford is no woman to let her story stop there. With 80 pages to go, she rushes in scented, scintillating Cousin Cedric, the new heir from Canada, to charm Lady Montdore off the shelf. A face lifting, some rigorous massage and the trick of pronouncing the word "brush" before entering the drawing room (it fixes her smile) convert her Edwardian pomp into a garish girlishness. Cedric completes his round of conquests by capturing Polly's husband, who has lost his interest in women anyway, and whisking him and Lady Montdore off to a gay Paris holiday. "So here we are, my darling," chortles Cedric to an old friend, "having lovely cake and eating it, too, which is one's great aim in life."

The frosting on Author Mitford's story of the happily selfish Montdores is so light and fluffy as to leave the reader wondering whether she is really selling satire or simple nostalgia for the good old prewar and pre-Labor days in Britain.

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