A Comedy of Middle-Age Manners : PARLOR GAMES <i> by Mavis Cheek (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 239 pp.; 0-671-68309-8) </i>

Mavis Cheek’s second novel introduces us to a “nice part of London called Chiswick and . . . an even nicer part of Chiswick called Bedford Park.” Here, protected by their redoubtable Neighborhood Watch committee and sustained in style by their husbands’ handsome incomes earned in the city, intelligent, articulate, liberal-minded wives inhabit a latter-day, transatlantic version of the suburbia portrayed in John Cheever’s “Oh What a Paradise It Seems.”

Times have changed, of course. Unlike their mothers of the 1950s, no Bedford Park wife stays home merely to fill the unglamorous job of housewife: “Bedford Park wives (as should all wives, they agree) gave up their jobs to be mothers, not housewives. . . . On the whole, they will not admit to enjoying life at home, but since its only real justification in this liberated part of the world is because small children make any other choice impossible, some of these women will go on to have a third and fourth child just to continue it. These additional offspring are generally called ‘accidents.’ ”

The cool, dry, semi-official voice of the unnamed narrator leads us to expect social--indeed, sociological--comedy, and this is precisely what “Parlor Games” delivers. The heroine, Celia, a typical Bedford Park wife, is married to Alex, a business lawyer. They have a son and daughter. Happily settled, Celia still enjoys the memories of her 1960s youth that flood back when she hears Manfred Mann on the radio.

As the story opens, Celia is preparing an elegant and elaborate dinner for her own 40th birthday party. Three other couples have been invited, each a neat set of sociological specimens. Hazel and John, also from Bedford Park, are the most similar to Celia and Alex in income and life style. Isabel and Dave, Celia’s older sister and brother-in-law, live in a less-fashionable area. They’ve kept their social consciences intact and are admirably down to earth, but Celia feels they lack the kind of sparkle she hopes she still has in her own life. Celia’s childhood friend, Susie, and Susie’s husband Tom are childless, rich, and glamorous. It seems to Celia that Tom and Susie lead the sorts of lives that Bedford Park women see on programs they don’t like to admit to watching, like “Dynasty” and “Dallas.”

Turning 40 doesn’t faze Celia--not too much. She is still vibrant and attractive. Even when her husband occasionally manages to resist her when she is trying her hardest to look seductive, her sexual self-confidence is bolstered by overtures (thus far refused) from Susie’s husband, Tom. Celia is looking forward to a little flirtation--probably innocent, but just possibly not.

“In Bedford Park,” as we are informed, “there is no such thing as middle age,” just as in Victorian times, when the houses in Bedford Park were built, “there was no such thing as puberty.” While the Victorian girl went straight from the nursery to womanhood, her modern counterpart feels that “You are still a young woman shopping in trendy shops until--suddenly one day--you suffer a fall in Chelsea Girl and need a hip operation.”

The fall Celia suffers takes the form of a blow to her self-esteem, when she discovers that her husband--predictably enough, but surprisingly to her--is having an affair. How Celia resolves her problem is not really a surprise either: The charm of this novel is not in the tale but in the manner of its telling.

The sly commentary that frames Celia’s story is a narrative tactic that has become a prominent feature (if not quite a fixture) of contemporary British practitioners of social comedy from A. N. Wilson to Fay Weldon. Cheek does not break new ground in this mode but delivers a highly polished performance, the sine qua non of writing social comedy in the first place.

“Parlor Games” is clearly a slight work, a diversion, but it is an intelligent diversion that knows what it is doing. The characters are types--each is a collection of traits rather than a rounded individual--and the plot is based on the classic comedic coincidences of missed meetings, chance encounters, misinterpreted messages and the wrong people being in the right places at the wrong times. It’s possible to object to the shallowness of the characters and the staginess of the plot, but that is to miss the point.

Celia may be silly, but she is capable of intense emotions, even as the author invites us to smile at how uncharacteristic such intensity seems on her: “An hour ago Celia was a woman in love. Now she is a woman racked by hate and seeking vengeance. . . . No longer is she the foolish paper cutout character of an Agatha Christie thriller. . . . Now she is that deeper, more profound commodity, the wronged heroine--and quite Shakespearean in her intensity.”

The nemesis that eventually overtakes Celia’s husband is hardly the stuff to satisfy Hamlet--or even Agatha Christie. A series of wittily portrayed minor mishaps leads to a small but satisfying redress of marital grievances. In the artificial “paradise” of Bedford Park, such artful resolutions seem more believable--more “realistic”--than a rawer kind of realism, yet they serve nonetheless to remind us that actions, however small, have consequences. “Tread on a beetle and the world is diminished, changed, however slightly,” remarks the narrator. Although nothing ever escapes beyond the clipped borders of the irony encircling these “parlor games” in the little world Cheek has evoked, coincidence is no mere stage trick and levity is achieved against a backdrop of disasters deftly evaded.