The Worm in the Apple

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER (218 pp.)--Rumer Godden--Viking ($3.50).

The literary voice of Rumer (Black Narcissus) Godden is soft, gentle and low, and so are her subjects--sensitive children, nuns, quietly contented families and the timeless tranquillities of India and England. It is always something of a shock when her characters come upon the worm of experience in the apple of innocence. But find it they do. After that Author Godden usually chucks the reader under his chin and reminds him that the world of man really began with a little knowledge of good and evil.

Rumer Godden's new novel starts innocently enough with five little English brothers and sisters, ranging from a few years to 16, going to France with their mother for a summer holiday. Mrs. Grey gets bitten by a horsefly and lands in the hospital, leaving the children to manage as best they can without Mum in a nearby pension on the Marne. For page upon page, everything hums along with the summery warmth of semifantasy. Greengage plums drop from the tree with juicy plops, the barges of the Marne glide noiselessly over the sunny water. The owner of the pension, Mademoiselle Zizi, has a rich and handsome young English lover named Eliot, who takes the children for rides in his blue-and-silver Rolls-Royce. Young Paul, the pension dishwasher, supplies the little Englishmen with assorted forbidden fruits--Gauloise cigarettes, wine dregs left in the glasses after a big luncheon, a rich vocabulary of French swear words. Poor, darling Mummy is still in the hospital--hurrah, hurrah!

The only fly in the ointment is 16-year-old Joss, senior daughter of the Greys. She and Eliot get the trembles whenever they brush shoulders--and Mlle. Zizi, a jealous old gentlewoman of at least 30, is beginning to brandish her falsies. Three-quarters of the way through her bee-loud glade, Author Godden starts dropping her surprises. Eliot, it seems, is no English gentleman after all: he is an international crook who, as a French paper prettily puts it, "collects precious stones, chiefly diamonds." As for Paul, he climbs up to Joss's bedroom and is about to collect something more precious than stones, when Eliot relegates him to the compost heap with a single knife-stab. Suddenly, the beautiful old house rings to the tramp of invading flatfeet and the idyl ends with a whimper: "Mother. I want Mother."

Absent, unfortunately, is the masterly ability of a De la Mare or a Simenon to portray a Garden of Eden in which the black serpent of evil slides easily and naturally about its business. But Author Godden tells her tale neatly enough to content those who enjoy closeups of children's growing pains and the clashes of innocence and experience.

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