WEXFORD NONE THE WISER

Harm Done. By Ruth Rendell. London: Hutchinson, 1999.

Reviewed by Ilsa Evans.


In the genre of crime fiction, despite the increasing bevy of feisty female heroines, the white, heterosexual male still tends to rule the roost. He is generally educated, experienced, astute, stubborn, dependable, intuitive… the list goes on, and few fit the bill more neatly than Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Reg Wexford. In addition, Wexford is happily married to the docile Dora, a fond father to both Sheila and Sylvia, a respected leader to his assorted male and female subordinates, and a veritable fount of literary allusions under even the most difficult circumstances.

Certainly, Wexford finds the circumstances trying throughout Harm Done where, once again, Rendell's characterization is remarkable and her sombre narrative technique compelling. In this novel, set as usual in the fictional British suburb of Kingsmarkham, several disparate plots are presented which Rendell then proceeds to weave skillfully into a less than flattering cross-section of community life. Two young women are kidnapped only to reappear a few days later with a strange story to tell. Shortly afterwards, a paedophile is released into a less than welcoming community whose concern slowly but surely escalates into a scene of mass hysteria during which a policeman is killed. Simultaneously the police, with some reluctance, are drawn into 'Hurt Watch', a new social initiative being launched in an attempt to combat domestic violence, which seems to mainly consist of handing out mobile phones to potential victims and informing their immediate neighborhood. Kingsmarkham also becomes home to a DV refuge run by a few dedicated volunteers, one of whom is Wexford's eldest daughter Sylvia. Wexford's rather strained relationship with this daughter (she is apparently neither as beautiful nor as charming as her younger sister – and can be rather an aggressive feminist at times) takes a great leap forward when she turns, rather hysterically, to her father for help. Several other minor sub-plots wind their way through the narrative but it is not long before the focus of Wexford, and the reader, is drawn to a situation unfolding in a seemingly happy family living in an upper-class neighborhood.

It is this situation which rapidly forms the crux of the novel. A three-year old girl, Sanchia Devenish, is taken from her bed in the middle of the night and disappears. Her parents are distraught; the police are called and, in the course of their investigation, are forced to look beyond the façade of happy family life presented to them. It is this façade and the incredible thinness of its veneer that is the most troubling aspect of the novel. Because Wexford, with all his experience and tendency towards accurate intuitive hunches, does not see what is staring him in the face. If there can be said to be a stereotype of the battered women, Fay Devenish would have to be it. She is small, thin and looks far older than her true age. She flinches at the sound of her husband's name, will barely speak in his presence, and spends almost her every waking moment scrubbing her house till it gleams before she rushes off to make herself presentable for his return home from work. She has no friends outside her family, and her missing three-year old daughter has not yet begun to speak. In one scene, Wexford visits the Devenish home to ask some questions and finds a grey-faced Fay lying on a sofa in her husband's study. She has apparently sustained an injury to her mouth so that she can only lisp, but pulls the blanket covering her up to her chin, and 'the hands which clutched its border were the pathetic little hands of a monkey clinging to the bars of its cage'. Their two sons enter the room and the elder, twelve-year old Edward, clenches his fists impotently as he stares at his father who dominates the conversation whilst playing the benign paterfamilias.

Yet Wexford, although puzzled by the strangeness of the scene before him, stops short of identifying it for what is so patently is. Despite the fact that he himself is involved with the new initiative designed to combat this very situation and that his own daughter works with victims of DV, Wexford turns and leaves the house none the wiser. To compound matters, this is not the first time that Rendell has had Wexford encounter domestic violence. Variations of the theme occur in many of her Chief Inspector Wexford novels. In fact, in 'Blood Lines', a short story published in 1995, Wexford is embroiled in a generational story of domestic violence and he reflects that:

Abused women have a look in common. Wexford castigated himself for not having
seen it when he first came to the house. It had nothing to do with bruises and not much
to do with a cowed, beaten way of holding themselves. That washed-out, tired, drained
appearance told it all, if you knew what you were looking for. (27)

Yet, several years later when faced with an almost identical washed-out, tired, drained appearance, Wexford still does not manage to put a label to the situation before him. The interesting question is whether this lack of his customary astuteness is simply presented to help the plot build to a climax, or is actually a deliberate ploy on Rendell's part. If it is, in fact, a purposeful narrative manoeuvre, then it is particularly brilliant because it has definitive parallels in real life - parallels that retard both the reporting of situations of domestic violence, and the police response to the few situations that are reported.

The 1998 Keys Young report on domestic violence, Against The Odds: How Women Survive Domestic Violence (commissioned by the Office of The Status of Women), contained several disturbing findings regarding the police and domestic violence. The report detailed the fear of victims to either being judged, or not believed at all. There was also strong evidence regarding the lack of confidence and low expectations held by many women about the police and what they would, or could, do to help them (xiv):

'Unless you walk in with blood pouring all over you, they don't think it's happening' (55)
'I was scared about not being believed and I thought, who would believe me
against him? He's such a good liar.' ( 33)
'When the police didn't act I felt so humiliated… my husband was gloating for weeks.' (55)
'I didn't call the police 'cause I didn't think they could do anything. I thought they would just calm me down… and what else could they do? (53)

Fay Devenish, then, was acting in a fairly typical manner when she did not report the abuse to the police. Perhaps their failure to realise what was right in front of them during the investigation even justified her decision to act alone. It is not until three-quarters of the way through the novel, when his daughter Sylvia chances on a photograph of the Devenish family and positively identifies Fay as a battered wife, that the penny drops and Wexford is forced to realise what he should have known all along. But along with the realisation comes a sense of frustration because, unless Fay lays charges against her husband, Wexford reasons that the police can do little. Yet she refuses:

'You're going to say I could call you, the police that is, and bring charges against
him, and have him in court, and I could leave – but where would I go? And it wouldn't stop, it wouldn't, he would just be angrier, and wherever I went he'd
find me, I know he would. He says so, he says he'd find me wherever I went.
There isn't any escape, not while he's alive and I'm alive, no escape at all.

Suddenly, despite the pathos of her situation, she becomes a co-author of the unfolding tragedy and the moralistic Wexford is 'frustrated by Fay Devenish's disinclination to have her husband indicted for assault or to give evidence against him…' She is now complicit in her own abuse, an irony which itself correlates to findings within the Keys Young report:

'I hate this domestic shit' is what they said. I always used to feel so guilty about why I
didn't go through with the restraining orders. (55)
In this culture, the police are still not people you go to for help. They are more about
trouble. It's really hard for women to seek help from police. (83)

Faye is now justified in her belief that the police can do nothing. Unless, that is, she pursues legal justice vigorously herself – and that is precisely the trap she wishes to avoid because she cannot afford to become an instigator herself. So the novel begins to wind up, the sub-plots are deftly resolved and Wexford exits on a well-deserved holiday. However, just when it looks as though Rendell has opted for a somewhat more realistic ending with Fay's torture continuing indefinitely, a happy ending is adroitly manufactured. Against all odds, David slays Goliath and even manages to evade a jail sentence in doing so. So the book is closed with a sigh of relief. But the issues raised within the pages of Harm Done cannot be put aside as easily. Wexford's failure to recognise (or want to recognise?) domestic violence when it was virtually slapping him in the face is indicative of the world we live in. In fact, the Keys Young report concluded with a series of suggested future directions to which Wexford and his ilk should pay close attention. Respectively, the first and last ones named were:

Educating key mainstream services and professionals to improve their ability to
identify domestic violence at an early stage and to respond to it more appropriately.
Improving further the response of the police and the criminal justice system to
domestic violence. (xvi)

Initiatives such as the fictional 'Hurt Watch' can only assist a situation where only 19% of women who are physically assaulted in a DV situation, report the incident to the police. Ironically, the Keys Young report found that, when the police acted decisively and in support of the woman involved, it made a huge difference to how the women responded. One woman said: 'The police were like a God that helped me' (54). But unfortunately, more often than not, the Fay Devenishes of this world stay in violent situations because they have a lack of faith in other people's ability to help them, and where they would far rather 'deal with it themselves' than call the police (xi). In Harm Done, whether intentionally or not, Rendell has made an astute social comment on police responses to domestic violence, and a heavy indictment on a society that virtually condones a certain type of violent crime.

They can train all the policemen, you can have all the ads you want on TV, but the men
are laughing all the way because firm action is not taken and charges are not
enforced. (59)
Community attitudes are hard to change, because the message is not being given
consistently that it's not OK. The messages, the publicity, says it's not OK, but the
police and the courts don't match that… that's one of the big problems. ( 83)
I lived in fear, under a dark cloud. (23)

Ilsa Evans is a postgraduate student in Women's Studies at Monash University.