Ashes Of Envy A FRIEND FROM ENGLAND

By R.Z. Sheppard

Rachel Kennedy, 32, is a working partner in a London bookshop. She lives alone in a snug flat over the store. She is astute, self-sufficient and discreet. Occasionally, when the mood is on her, Rachel goes cruising, though she puts the matter even less romantically: "I go out, seek companions, bear them home . . . No bourgeois sentiments for me, no noble passions." Elsewhere, Anita Brookner's questionable heroine pitches her case more strongly: "I had resolved at a very early stage never to be reduced to any form of emotional beggary, never to plead, never to impose guilt, and never to consider the world well lost for love. I think of myself as a plain dealer and I am rather proud of the honesty of my transactions."

Readers are not to be blamed if they keep an eye on the silverware. People who boast of their integrity bear close watching: they may not be outright thieves, but it is a good bet that their righteousness masks a shifty character. So A Friend from England is an ironic title, unless Brookner is deluding herself -- and there is not much chance of that.

The author is an expert on the painting of the 18th and 19th centuries and a teacher at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. Her six previous novels include Hotel du Lac, the 1984 winner of Britain's top fiction award, the Booker Prize. Yet despite her finished style and genteel settings, she is as hard-boiled as any writer of detective fiction. Many of Brookner's principals are updatings of that familiar character, the English spinster as connoisseur of other people's behavior. Rachel is not only unattached but detached, a state that suits her analytical intelligence and chilly rectitude.

This is apparent in her association with the Livingstones, Oscar, Dorrie and their 27-year-old daughter Heather. Oscar is an accountant who, as Rachel puts - it, was "inherited" from her father. This air of Oscar as family retainer does not last long. He wins millions in the national football pool, retires and asks Rachel if she would be good enough to guide their placid daughter in the ways of modern womanhood. The shift in social distinction is subtle but apparent: Rachel may be hard-nosed and independent, but whether or not she notices, she has been cast as the governess.

The Livingstones slip into affluence gracefully; they are pleasant, generous with their friendship but dull. Rachel is a frequent recipient of their hospitality, even though they represent the bourgeois sentiments she mocks. Bringing up Heather proves to be exasperating: she combines naivete with a calm disposition that approaches smugness. "One thought of her not exactly as a woman," says Rachel, "but as some sort of animal known for its unassuming qualities, a heifer, perhaps." And, she adds, "heifers are also traditionally associated with sacrifice."

The ritual is performed at the wedding altar when Heather marries a man who turns out to be a homosexual. Rachel notices him wearing lipstick and eyeshadow in a local wine bar, and the reader is left to wonder how bovine the bride must be to have been led into this situation. The union lasts longer than one might expect, though once free, Heather heads off to Venice, where she promptly becomes a novelistic cliche: the Englishwoman who falls in love with an Italian.

At the Livingstones' request, Rachel nips off to advise her unofficial charge about the probable consequences of her Latin romance. The confrontation has the surprise effect of changing the polarity of Brookner's personality study. In an uncharacteristic show of spirit, Heather basically tells her friend from England to bugger off. Rachel's response is a revealing mixture of feminist hellfire and the ashes of envy. She uses her own disappointments with love and money as valuable object lessons at the same time that she accuses Heather of having it too easy: "Women don't sit at home any more, you know, dreaming of Prince Charming. They don't do it because they've found out that he doesn't exist. As you should have found out. I live in the real world, the world of deceptions. You live in the world of illusions."

Heather, needless to say, goes off to the arms of her handsome illusion. Rachel retreats to her solitary world, where she will undoubtedly continue to practice self-deception about what is real. And Author Brookner? She can take a small bow for her own skillfully executed illusion.