In darkest England.

WHY should America have all the best trials? No sooner had the O. J. Simpson case ended than, in England, the trial began of Rosemary West, who is accused of torturing, raping, and murdering ten girls and young women, including her own 16-year-old daughter. All except one were buried in or around the Wests' house, Number 25, Cromwell Street, Gloucester. National pride has been restored by the worldwide interest in this macabre tale, English perversion being proved once again as perverted as any in the world.

The trial is taking place in Winchester, a small and sedate city which was once the capital of England, and is now known mainly as the retirement resort of admirals and generals. Unaccustomed to the attention of the press, Winchester has been invaded by an international media circus -- though no cameras are allowed in the courtroom, and the seats for the press are strictly limited. One does not have to be Nostradamus to predict the publication soon after the trial of several books about the case.

Mrs. West is a 41-year-old woman of matronly appearance who denies the charges and has spent her months of captivity before trial calmly knitting clothes for her grandchildren. (Her husband, the late Frederick West, spent most of his time in prison playing pool with the wardens. He hanged himself shortly before his trial, much to the glee of the other prisoners, who loudly cheered the news of his demise.) If Mrs. West is found guilty, her knitting is surely destined to become as legendary as that of Madame Defarge.

A case such as this comes but once a decade, and it must be admitted (if somewhat shamefacedly) that it has added immensely to the gaiety of the nation. As the police pursued their archaeological investigations into the floors and gardens of Number 25 (as the Wests' house became familiarly known), no dinner party was complete without speculation as to how many corpses the forces of law and order would ultimately find.

I myself happened to be at a dinner party in a village a few miles from Gloucester on the day when the sixth and seventh batches of human remains were discovered interred under the kitchen. Frederick West was a builder, and one of the guests at the dinner party was a doctor whose office had been extended by him. He displayed distinct signs of unease. Another of the guests had considered employing Mr. West to build a conservatory he had wanted to add to his house, but something in the builder's manner, a je ne sais quoi, persuaded the guest not to employ him, despite West's considerate willingness to delay the work until the prospective employer went on his vacation.

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that speculations about many more buried cadavers, as yet undiscovered, became rife: after all, about five thousand people a year disappear without trace in Britain.

In the meantime, Number 25, Cromwell Street, Gloucester, has become something of a national monument. The street is run down and shabby, with torn and ill-fitting curtains drawn across people's windows even during the daytime. The paint is peeling everywhere: indeed, Cromwell Street seems to epitomize the slovenliness of modern England.

Next door to Number 25 is a hideous and mean little Seventh-Day Adventist Church, that seems to be making the best of its neighbors' perfidy. It offers, according to a poster, "cast-iron security in an insecure world," and "peace and sanity in a mad, mad world." "Are you missing joy, happiness, contentment, peace?" it asks. I had no idea the Adventists had such a sophisticated sense of humor.

The windows of Number 25 have been covered over; the front and back yards are raw earth and gravel, in which nothing, not even a blade of grass, grows. More than 18 months after the discovery that Number 25 was a mass murderer's lair, a steady stream of cars crawls by, with people hanging out of the windows to take snapshots of it. For myself, I began to wonder what would be the eventual fate of Number 25: would it be pulled down, as if bricks and mortar were themselves the source of human evil? Surely it could more profitably be turned into a waxwork chamber of horrors -- Madame Tussaud's Goes West -- in order to revive Gloucester's struggling tourist industry, the medieval city having been comprehensively destroyed by the city council, as only a British city council knows how.

As the prosecution unfolded its case, and the details of what had been done at Number 25 were revealed, the general attitude to the case became rather more grim and somber. Horror is amusing so long as it remains baroque or rococo; in the realist style, it is far less alluring.

It was alleged that the Wests cruised the streets together in search of victims to entice to their home, Mrs. West's presence acting as a reassurance. She took full part in the sexual assaults herself -- the prosecutor said --and tied up, whipped, beat, and abused the victims. One of them, who lived to tell the tale, described how Mrs. West went out in the middle of these sadistic activities to make a cup of tea for her: a peculiarly English touch to the story, one feels.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the revelations so far is that, just as the Communists of the Communist Manifesto "disdain to conceal their opinions," so the Wests apparently took few pains to disguise what they were doing, at least in the early stages: for in an age of relativism, the psychopath is king.

Their next-door neighbor knew that the Wests were bringing defenseless young women home, an activity of which Mr. West openly boasted to her, and that the Wests were -- to put it delicately -- sexually ravenous. Frederick West also told his neighbor that he might use his cellar as a torture chamber. Moreover, he was once arrested when one of his victims, having been abducted and raped by him and then let go, went to the police. He was merely fined, however, for indecent assault, an example of lenient penal policy that definitely did not conduce to public welfare.

Of course, everyone is now trying to extract the real meaning of this sad case, as quinine is extracted from cinchona bark. For example, a columnist of the liberal Guardian agonized as to whether he was being hypocritical in telling his children about the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, but not about the horrors of provincial England. Is Cromwell Street, then, Britain's Auschwitz and its Rwanda rolled into one? Call me insensitive, but I still see a slight difference.

No, the lesson so far of the West case is one that is distasteful to our modern age, with its gimcrack you can have it all, be all you can be, go with your feelings philosophy: that not all sexual impulses are equal and that some sexual activity is distinctly nasty and ought not to be tolerated. Obvious, but frequently denied.