BOOK REVIEW : Gentle, Untidy Fable Unsheaths Its Claws : LOT’S WIFE <i> by Tom Wakefield</i> ; Serpent’s Tail Press $9.95, 157 pages

God must love the poor, the saying goes, because He made so many of them. If so, He ought to have a soft spot for the mean, seeing that there are quite a few of those around too. Or so Tom Wakefield suggests in his comic, scathing and oddly gentle fable about love and subversion in an old-people’s home in England.

“Lot’s Wife” pits two residents of Restmore, Henry Checkett and Peggy Thurston, against Veronica Fairweather, the institution’s implacably uplifting director. Henry and Peggy are polymorphously sexy, in their 70s, slightly incontinent and in love with each other. They represent anarchy, mainly because in their respective ways--Henry through vagueness, Peggy through shrill attack--they fight for their individuality.

Successfully, as it turns out. The steely Veronica, something of an English Nurse Ratched, will be upended. But it will be through love of various kinds; she will join her inmates, finally, and win by losing. Henry and Peggy are partly responsible. Mainly responsible is Alasdair, the local health officer and Veronica’s superior. He is a tired, non-bureaucratic bureaucrat. He is also an angel, with a touch of demonic power. At the end, he probably turns into a cat.

This may sound untidy and a little coy. “Lot’s Wife” is often untidy, usually arbitrary and sometimes sweet. It is not coy, though: It is unsettling. Even the sweetness is unsettling; it is sugar shock. Wakefield’s fables have claws.

Take the old couple. They sneak tea together in the boiler room, boycott group activities where possible and, to frustrate Veronica’s probing, act deliberately senile. Their love is sudden and passionate, although necessarily disembodied. They move in together, look at each other naked, and find they have grown alike. Henry’s breasts are bigger; Peggy is balder. Peggy has been modestly bisexual; Henry, modestly homosexual. Now, they have come upon a sexual feeling that transcends gender.

Still and all, their relationship could be fey and soft were it not for their nightmares and their terrible pasts. They lived poor, abused and in what ought to be hopelessness. Love is an act of rebellion against all that.

Against Veronica, as well. The Veronica war is the book’s bravura comedy. Everyone joins in: Peggy and Henry, Alasdair--in his redemptive fashion, as we will see--and the author. One of the lovely savage practices of many modern English writers (Kingsley Amis, for example) is their glee in creating loathsome characters--they usually represent power--and persecuting them.

Veronica seems made for burning. She lectures the inmates about her golden, love-filled childhood. She produces an old, bedraggled teddy bear as a memento, and when she simperingly asks if her audience knows why she is showing it, Peggy takes a swipe:

“Well, she can’t answer back can she?” Veronica ignores the dig. The toy, she says, reminds her of her mother. “Oh, was she handicapped?” Peggy growls.

Everyone has a go at Veronica and her pretentions. Proudly wearing her fake-fur coat, she sits at a cafeteria table. Her lunch companion tells about a friend who was shot in the countryside while wearing one; she was mistaken for a coypu. Veronica has not heard of a coypu. A kind of rat, the other explains helpfully.

She boasts about her “country place.” In fact, it is part of a housing development overlooking a marsh and a railroad track. She makes jelly and gives jars of it to her staff at Christmas, a rural, homey touch. In fact, the apples are brought from London, and the presents cost her about $1 each. In return, she asks her subordinates not to waste money on individual gifts but to contribute to some common present; spending no more, say, than $3 each.

Alasdair snubs her, patiently rejecting her efforts to get the disruptive Henry and Peggy transferred to a mental hospital. Yet, being an angel, he knows you don’t reach a mean person by being good. When Veronica rages against the plans of a publicity-conscious local schoolmaster to bring his children to Restmore for a Christmas party--it is exploitation, she complains--Alasdair unexpectedly rages with her.

She is stunned. Alasdair has reached her through her bad qualities. They are hers, after all, and he has acknowledged her. It releases a stifled goodness; in her own misguided way, after all, she had worked passionately for her inmates. She falls in love, and Alasdair, human as well as angelic, shares her sexy stirrings. Love spreads onward; suddenly, Veronica--an orphan who lies about her happy childhood--falls in love with Henry and Peggy as well.

It is a happy ending, full of arbitrary surprises and switches. Alasdair is inconveniently run over by a truck, but suddenly this suspect cat shows up.

But Wakefield has led us over some uncompromising ground about age, hardship and loneliness. If the ending is as blatantly cheery as the finale of a pantomime--one of those children’s musical shows, like “Toad of Toad Hall,” that the English put on at Christmas--the book has somehow earned it.

Next: Judith Freeman reviews “Prose and Poetry of the American West,” edited by James C. Work (University of Nebraska Press).