A Little Organ Music, Please : A TIME TO DANCE, <i> By Melvyn Bragg (Little, Brown: $18.45; 220 pp.)</i>

September chases April with the sweating indignity and eye-bulging disarray of somebody fumbling up a down escalator. Humbert Humbert’s pursuit of Lolita was a monumental foolishness; so, in “A Time to Dance,” is the passion of a small-town English banker in his 50s for a raven-haired teen-ager.

But Humbert’s monumentality outlives his foolishness. Through his sentience and the scour and sweep of his wit and longing, he gave voice to what, after all, is one of the universal themes. Life moves clockwise and runs down; passion struggles counterclockwise and refuses to run down.

The nameless protagonist of Melvyn Bragg’s novel plods through his obsession. He gets more fleshly satisfaction than Humbert ever did, and he may even come to a happy ending of sorts. But his happiness and his misery are voiced in a feverish rhetoric marked by not much wit and only occasional self-awareness. Nabokov’s subject is a butterfly snared on an obsession, and palpitating; Bragg’s is a snared caterpillar in a fuzzy tremor:

“Where did you come from? Without you I would have missed the violent sensations of uncontrollable erotic love. You think I blame you, Bernadette. You too think I have shamed and ruined myself. No, no, no, no. To love and, even greater, to be loved. What better world is there?”

Thus purply writes the banker at the start of the book, but toward the end of the story, told largely in retrospect. He has retired from his job, has given up his well-appointed house, is living in a hovel and shambling about town in shabby clothes and a growth of beard. It is a long fall after successive ecstasies. In fact, the fall will lift, suddenly and awkwardly, into a tentative and not really convincing recuperation.

Bragg’s novel, like its plot and its language, makes wild lurches. When his narrator gathers his wits, to recount the beginning of the affair, it is taut and absorbing. The progress from interest to desire to choking need is told with a compelling and contagious excitement. The scenes of full-fledged sexual passion, when the affair is at its heights, and the suspicions, fears and recriminations that pull the pair apart in between the heights, are heavy melodrama.

The narrator, pillar of a small town in England’s Lake District, is one of three businessmen who serve as judges of a school essay contest. One essay stands out for its force, wit and good English. Its 18-year-old author, surprisingly, is a daughter of the disreputable Kennedy family, which lives in a housing project and is continually involved in pub brawls and swindles.

After a few weeks, Bernadette Kennedy--she is the winner--comes to the narrator’s house to give an account of her plans. She sits in his library--he is an amateur historian of the Lake District--scrupulously well mannered and radiating sex.

The narrator invents pretexts to see her again; she is alternately elusive and forward. Finally, in a kind of test, she invites him to a nearby fair. Wearing a microskirt, she flaunts herself before the local toughs; he--sedentary, proper and scared--manages to stay calm. They go to a pub afterwards, have a long dinner and talk about books. Then she takes him up into the lakeside hills and they make passionate love. And then she vanishes for a week or so.

For a while, as Bernadette moves off and comes back, flashes hot and cold, and seems to oscillate among tenderness, passion and indifference, we get the story from the narrator’s point of view. He is alternately ecstatic and wretched; proud of her love and his vigor at one moment; at the next, suspicious that she may be using him, that she may have other lovers, that she may find him ridiculous.

After a protracted quarrel, she writes him a long letter and we see another side. Raped at 12 or 13, she is ashamed of the sexuality that to him is a sign of life. She loves him as much, it seems, as he loves her, but she is afraid he will think her a slut. When he is timid--worried that she will be put off by his age and fierce desire--she takes it as a rebuff.

Somehow, her confession fails to heal. For no very evident reason other than to keep the plot bubbling, the misunderstandings, suspicions and fights go on. There is a soap-opera quality to the comings and goings, the estrangements and the recriminations. It is X-rated soap opera; even the most explicit sex scenes have an overripe sentimentality to them. We all but hear the organ music swelling and fading.

A subplot concerning the narrator’s patient wife, who is dying of cancer, adds an additional melodramatic twist. In its own terms, though, the portrait of the wife--devoted but not sentimental, and with a strong appetite for the limited and now-fading life she lives--is engaging and touching. When the narrator tells of reading the newspaper to her in the hospital--dying, she is avid to know the days’ goings-on--there is a human specificity quite absent from all the splendor in the Lake District grass.

It is in the early chapters, in the narrator’s gradual igniting, that Bragg is at his best. We feel the self-doubt, the fear of ridicule, the feverish reading of signals--Is Bernadette aware of his feelings? Does she respond to them?--and the sudden opening of windows in a stuffy life when he becomes convinced that she does. At one point, early on, he writes down the advantages of an affair. One of them is: “Who will I turn out to be?”

Apart from these early stages of passion--most believable when it is still in doubt--the narrator never comes into focus, and what we do apprehend is not very interesting. Bernadette, less fully explained, emerges more alluringly. The narrator’s despairing and windy monologues, depicting her as an enigmatic Lolita, clash with her own faintlyheard efforts to show she is something else. But he drowns her out.