Unhappy House

TAKE THREE TENSES--Rumer Godden --Little, Brown ($2).

The owners had refused to renew the Danes' 99-year lease on their vast London house. Huge, white-haired old "Rolls" Dane -- General Sir Roland Iron monger Dane, K.C.B., D.S.O.-- cried, "I don't want the family to go out of the house." Actually, the family had been out of the house for years. But in the memory of Rolls, the only one left, they were still there. In a series of flashbacks, the past becomes the present and the family lives again.

The Dane family was large, rich and unhappy. Rolls's father, John Dane, called "The Eye" because the family thought he saw everything, was stern and ambitious ("I want a big house," he said when he was married. "My ideas, my schemes are big. Very ambitious and very, very big"). Griselda, his beautiful wife, was afraid of him. Rolls's older sister Selina, who never married, was possessive, bitter and tyrannical. She ruled the house when her parents died. Pelham, Rolls's brother, was too inhibited to display his real emotions. Rolls himself never did anything he really wanted to do. It was the family that finally pushed him into the army.

The family life was altered somewhat when The Eye brought home little Lark. Her parents, both singers, had been killed in a train wreck. She was different from the Danes, gay and dreamy; Rolls fell in love with her. But Selina soon subdued her. After a few years, life with the Danes became intolerable for Lark. She ran away and married an Italian nobleman.

Author Godden (Black Narcissus) saves the mellow, memory-filled house for the family by having Rolls buy it as a present for his niece Grizel. Then a Nazi bomb caves in one of its walls, crushing out Rolls's life. Dying, he summons the spirit of Lark for a last talk. "Those [past] . . . actions were like thorns and wounds in our minds," says Lark. "But that is all over." "I love you, Lark," cries Rolls. "I love you. How much I love you."

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