Jolley’s People: Seams That Ravel, Ties That Bind : THE SUGAR MOTHER <i> by Elizabeth Jolley (Harper & Row: $16.95; 224 pp.) </i> : STORIES <i> by Elizabeth Jolley (Viking: $17.95; 312 pp.)</i>

Take a fussy professor who frets about his age, keeps logs on his bodily functions and depends heavily for comfort on his capable doctor wife. Send the wife away on a year’s fellowship. The minute she’s gone, summon the new tenants from next door--mother and young daughter--who have locked themselves out, necessitating some masculine assistance. . . .

The result is Elizabeth Jolley’s very funny eighth novel, “The Sugar Mother,” Prof. Edwin Page’s education.

On his first night alone, we find Edwin, an Elizabethan scholar at an Australian university, feeling superannuated in his field, brooding about Alzheimer’s and jotting notes for a lecture.

“There are two types of novels,” he writes, “those which end with the characters getting married and living happily ever after and those which start with the characters married and living unhappily.”

What stuffy Edwin, simply straining for effect, doesn’t consider is that he may not be covering all the bases. A third novel type might well begin with a happily married man resentful at being abandoned and hence unconsciously open to alternatives.

Enter plump, plain Leila Bott and mother. With reluctant chivalry (noting their tasteless clothes, declasse accents and vulgar curiosity about his childless state), Edwin offers the spare room in his house.

Later, as he approaches the bathroom thinking wistfully of his wife, he encounters Leila in half-clothed, nubile splendor. One glimpse, and he is reeling.

Before long, the women are living in his spare room, watching TV, commandeering his kitchen, filling it with delicious smells while harping about progeny: “You must miss a lot not having kiddies. . . . Have you ever considered adopting?”

As Leila moons about, seemingly smitten with “Dr. Page,” and his ardor for her grows, her mother suggests an arrangement. For a price, Leila will act as a surrogate (a “sugar mother,” in Mrs. Bott’s parlance) and Edwin may have her in his bed.

Does Edwin want a child? Does he really plan to spring one on his returning wife, much as earlier he considered buying her a kitten?

It’s evidence of Edwin’s desperation for a quick fix--for a reprieve from his loneliness--that he falls so hard for both Botts. Mrs. Bott takes his life in hand, feeds him, appears to endorse him completely (“A gentleman’s got to have his little fling. . . . A man knows what he wants. . . .”). At the same time, she’s resolutely self-possessed, sinister even, in her march toward her own goals. (“Nice tune,” she says blandly when he tries to interest her in Brahms.)

Leila, however, is such a blank that even Edwin’s absent wife eclipses her. Surfacing constantly in Edwin’s broodings, in chit-chatty phone calls, in his conversations with their married friends, Cecilia is one of Jolley’s liveliest characters--a lovely, witty obstetrician with a piggish appetite and a penchant for inappropriate giggle fits. Her marriage to Edwin, though it has its problems, seems strong and well-balanced, especially set against his furtive cuddles with Leila.

In fact, as the book progresses, it’s clear that marriage--not surrogate motherhood, not mid-life crisis--is Jolley’s subject; her primary interest, the complex, mysterious mix of companionship, shared tastes and social life that binds a couple--and the pressures that threaten them.

Without giving away her resolution, it’s safe to say that somewhere late in the book, Edwin wishes for World War III to come along and solve his problems--and then realizes that even wars take a long time to develop. So, by implication, do families. So do unions between people.

In an author’s note to her recently released “Stories,” Jolley addresses the short-term longings that cause unions to founder, a prominent theme in much of her work:

“Perhaps, because of too much shy hope and tenderness and expectation, people discard each other when it might be more satisfactory to discard the complacent acceptance of the values of our society and education and the repeats on television.”

Like Edwin, the characters in Jolley’s stories are obsessed with what others think. They run from families and take refuge in self-deception. Sometimes, returning home, they find a wild happiness among their own kind.

The first six stories--about a ragtag family on the edge of the law--combine humor with rough realism to dramatize survival strategies of the poor. Several others, especially “A Hedge of Rosemary,” explore the locked-in sadness of old people, who carry history in their silences. Others concern the value of land to the immigrant, or the strength of women who forge lives in the absence of men.

While the collection contains many fine stories, some suffer from quick, pat resolutions (“A New World,” “The Fellow Passenger”), and a few (like the Uncle Bernard stories, about a Dutch immigrant to Australia) seem more like the early bits of a novel than complete pieces in themselves.

Indeed, since many similar characters, motifs and phrases run like musical riffs through Jolley’s stories, spilling over into her novels, it’s tempting to read the stories as a sort of artist’s sketchbook. In a wonderful story, “The Travelling Entertainer,” for example, we might glimpse Edwin and Cecilia Page’s precursors in lonely Morris, the household salesman, and his physiology instructor wife.

For the growing ranks of Elizabeth Jolley fans, the clues she leaves about her methodology should prove just as interesting as her novels are richly, resonantly entertaining.