Naked Tea : HOME THOUGHTS <i> by Tim Parks (Grove Press: $16.95; 208 pp.) </i>

“Evasion is paid for” is the moral of Tim Parks’ deceptively blithe novel about a gaggle of British expatriates living, scheming, gossiping and partner swapping in Verona.

In a sense, “Home Thoughts” is a second-generation Kingsley Amis novel. Its characters are seedy and comical; their intellectual poses mask a schoolboy greediness; their civility is a coat tattered by their own prickles.

In his prime--”Lucky Jim” and the novels that followed--Amis reflected the tensions and pretensions of postwar Britain, when such things as the welfare state, a certain theoretical idealism, trendy life styles and cultural liveliness were all in the air, if largely to be satirized. There was bounce to the awfulness and a tendency to happy endings.

With Parks, the schoolhouse has been leased out for executive training seminars. It is, as one of his characters puts it, “Thatcher time.” Just what that means, of itself, is not particularly clear. There’s no sign that the author is happy about it. What he is saying, though, is that it’s winter for the grasshoppers and time to take ant lessons.

“Home Thoughts” begins with a joke and turns sad. The joke, in the epigraph, consists of Robert Browning’s lines: “Oh to be in England, now that April’s here,” followed by a comment in a secondary-school exam paper: “Why didn’t he go home then?”

The sadness takes form slowly in Julia, the protagonist. At 33, she has come to Verona to teach English at the university. It is a flight from a messy life.

Moody and acerbic, she possesses a bristly charm that has won her a place in her London circle of aging bright young things. Aging is the point; her long off-again, on-again affair with Lenny, a BBC producer, has come to seem unbearable.

Years before, when she was pregnant, he had wanted to marry her; she had an abortion, instead, to avoid tying herself down. Now the seriousness is hers, and he, married to an actress, wants to keep things light.

Expatriate life in Italy is a classical kind of escape. Julia joins her compatriots at the university: Alan, a frustrated novelist and his wife, Elaine; Colin, an aging Scottish radical with a sexy young wife, Marina; Flossy, a lesbian militant, and Sandro, an Italo-Canadian Don Juan.

Before long, Julia is sleeping with Sandro; who will also be sleeping with Elaine, Marina and a middle-aged Italian woman professor. Apart from romantic permutations, the little band devotes itself to academic intrigue and listening to the BBC.

There is comedy in it. Parks gives a splendidly wacky excerpt from an English conversation manual written by Sandro’s professor, who is a paranoiac.

Mary--so the lesson goes--informs Jane that a man is at the door; Jane tells her that it is her grandfather.

“Mary: There’s a cat on the sofa. What am I to do?

“Jane: The only important thing for you to do is to let Grandfather in. He may be tired and anxious to see me. It was he who helped me when I was in trouble two years ago. He always gives a hand to everybody.

“Mary: All right, the door isn’t far away: He’ll soon be in.”

The comedy turns darker. Colin loses both Marina and his job. Elaine leaves Alan; he runs over and kills a young bicyclist, goes into depression and makes several feeble attempts at suicide.

The darkness comes not so much from what the expatriates find in Verona as from what each of them has left behind. Julia discovers that escape has no savor to it. She writes to Diana, her former roommate, that the affair with Sandro has no intensity or urgency; that it lacks reality.

“You meet people here, Flossy, Sandro, and you imagine they’ll be to you what other people have been to you in the past. You’re in a hurry to change, to set up home. Only then you find they’re not what you expected at all and that you can’t simply choose to be intimate with them. Or sometimes it’s as if none of us were quite all here. . . .”

Expatriation is the obvious evasion but not the most important one. The truly crippling escape was the life that Julia and her circle have lived in London. Her depressions, her restlessness, her continuing obsession with Lenny, all stem from the same thing: her abortion, years before.

“This is the turning point,” she writes Lenny, “the point in my life at which the past becomes more attractive than the future, the point beyond which fantasy is always for another parallel life which branched off from mine at that crucial forking of the ways. A sort of suicide, if you like.”

The lives of Julia and her circles--in Verona and in London--are contrasted with that of her London roommate. Considerably too neatly, the flighty Diana marries a businessman. He is a kind, grave banker who lives entirely in the life of his Thatcherite time; without evasion.

When they have a deformed baby, not only do they keep it--in contrast with Julia’s abortion--but he quits his business to run a foundation for the handicapped. He will run it on sound business principles.

Clearly, there is a great deal of authorial arranging in “Home Thoughts.” Its Londoners and expatriates are card figures, for the most part; and Parks deals with them, sometimes amusingly and sometimes relentlessly.

On the other hand, Julia, even though she is something of a familiar type, does manage to move us. She is vociferous and sometimes unbearable. Yet her final moments, when she pursues the logic of her evasions by taking up an entirely anonymous life in Vicenza--duller and more remote than Verona--have a real, unforced sadness to them.