Three's a Crowd

THE CAUTIOUS HEART (186 pp.)--William Sansom--Reynal ($3.50).

Marie O'Hara is pretty, and Colin, her escort, is falling-down drunk, so it is only natural for the nightclub pianist who is the nameless narrator-hero of this novel to offer help. Even as the trio sways "like a chorus line" through the nighttime streets of North London, the pianist feels drawn to the girl beyond the call of gentlemanly duty. When Marie invites him upstairs for a meal a few days later, his mind fairly boils with mingled hopes and doubts. For though "there was once a time, a golden age, when such an invitation could be taken to mean one thing only," nowadays a man never can tell. So, while Marie cooks, her visitor paces. Staring through the window, he spots "two slack dead pairs of men's socks" on a laundry cord--and instantly he is jealous.

During dinner, the nervous guest is too jumpy to look her in the eye, yet he dare not look any lower. He struggles simultaneously to 1) eat his omelette, 2) ignore Marie's sweater, 3) forget the socks 4) make conversation. And then, abruptly, incomprehensibly, they are clasped together on the couch. But the unsleeping, worrying mind refuses to leave well alone. "Whose socks are those?" he asks. "Actually," Marie answers, "Colin's."

Thereafter Colin is less the third member of a triangle than one of humanity's eternal albatrosses. Broke, drunk, homeless, he is "a kind of unconscious missionary" who, by sponging on the lovers mercilessly, gives his victims a chance to show their better nature. When the pianist finally proposes to Marie in a railroad dining car, Colin is still there--up front with the detective who is arresting him for petty thievery. But it seems unlikely that either wedding bells or prison cells will succeed in keeping those socks off Marie's clothesline.

The Cautious Heart is British Novelist Sansom's fifth novel (among the others: The Loving Eye). It is sage, funny, benign and stamped with Sansom's special mastery of situations in which sex, humor and sympathy fight for supremacy in a human battle that never ends.

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