Gotham Diary:
The False Servant
14 January 2014

Over the years, I’ve read a great deal of Ruth Rendell. But I don’t much write about it. There isn’t a lot to say about escaping into the lives of rather creepy people who manipulate their way, sometimes successfully, more often meeting with catastrophic failure, through the stunted worlds in which they imagine themselves to be living. Rendell’s writing, while always alert, is often desultory, perhaps because of the attempt to open up those stunted imaginations. I find that the creepy people don’t haunt me; most of them are forgotten soon after I’ve read about them, dissolved in the stew of Rendell’s creepiness. Rendell writes about depravity, and depravity, I’m happy to report, does not figure in my everyday experience. I know that it’s out there. But I do my best to avoid it. I don’t always agree with Rendell’s views — liberally dispensed in some of her books — but I heed the message that I hear loud and clear: Stay away from creepy people. Maybe that’s why I keep reading Rendell: to maintain my immunity.

Ever since I got my first e-reader, I’ve been reading Rendell in that format, and not cluttering up the house with books that I probably won’t re-read. Amazon makes sure that I’m notified when a new title appears, and at the end of every book there are suggestions of others. Usually, I’ve already read them, but not always. Rendell is amazingly prolific. Have I read half of her output? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I haven’t.

The other day, I was roused from my state of tending to regard Ruth Rendell as a household commodity by Donna Leon. In a startling passage near the end of her collection of essays, My Venice, Leon sings the praises of Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone — a book that I hadn’t read. In “On Books,” Leon talks about the preliminary decisions that must be made before a crime novel can be started. One of the necessary ingredients, she blandly reminds us, is mystery. “And there should be a mystery,” she writes. Then she immediately discusses a book that ostensibly flaunts its lack of one.

Ruth Rendell’s early masterpiece, A Judgment in Stone, begins, “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” Apparently, then, there is no mystery because we know from the very beginning who done it and why they done it. But the book, as it unfolds, causes in the reader the same gap-mouthed horror as does Oedipus Rex, as he sees nemesis winging ever closer to its victims, sees them ask the questions and make the discoveries that will lead to their destruction, while the reader is forced to remain silent on the other side of the page, unable to save these good and generous people from the evil that has entered their lives. But she’s another genius, and we still are not, so the writer needs a mystery.

Leon is wrong, of course, about the lack of mystery in A Judgment in Stone, and I’m sure that she is aware of this. Rendell’s opening statement is hardly a conventional assertion of cause and effect; illiteracy does not breed murderers. There must be something more, and there is more, a lot more; with a wealth of sharp-eyed detail and sharp-tongued character assessment, the novel fills in the gulf that the first sentence opens. It is harrowing, but not so very remarkable from a technical point of view. Crime novels frequently conclude with detectives re-enacting the events leading up to a crime. In A Judgment in Stone, the re-enactment is replaced by an enactment that takes up almost all of the book.

But what Leon says about the effect of reading A Judgment in Stone is almost sublime; the comparison to Oedipus Rex is not impertinent. Rendell’s writing here is as polished as ever, and the suspense is unflagging. As Alfred Hitchcock repeatedly demonstrated, waiting for something that you know is going to happen can be as agonizing as waiting for something uncertain — something merely “dangerous.” Rendell works through her material with virtuosic dexterity, her text a sequence of exquisite juxtapositions. But I am not going to blather on about the virtues of A Judgment in Stone. What Leon had to say made me want to read it, and I hope that it will make you want to read it, too, if you haven’t already.

***

As usual, however, I didn’t see things quite as Rendell does — or Leon. Leon calls the Coverdales “good and generous people.” But this is easy virtue. The Coverdales are gentry; they’re expected to be good and generous. It’s as much a part of their station in life as shooting and going to university. They are certainly not bad people. But they’re not innocent, either. And while they don’t deserve to die, they do bring their problem upon themselves.

The Coverdales’ situation, at the beginning of the story, is one that becomes very familiar in the second half of Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants, to wit: servants, lack thereof. Jacqueline Coverdale has been unable to find a servant who will keep her house, Lowfield Hall, really clean. Although she cooks and gardens, Jacqueline is not about to take up dusting and polishing. So someone must be found, and, into this need, Eunice Parchman insinuates herself by fraud.

Eunice is not a servant, and never has been one; she fakes her references. What Eunice is is a diligent worker, a natural cleaner and polisher. So Jacqueline Coverdale is delighted to have her in the house, even though no one else is. (Jacqueline’s husband, George, indulges his wife, against his better judgment. Anything to make her happy! The two children who also die, the previously widowed George’s daughter, a university student, and Giles, Jacqueline’s son by a prior marriage, are similarly discomfited.) But Jacqueline mistakes Eunice for a servant. The dissonance between the two outlooks comes into screeching view as the Coverdales, imagining that they are treating Eunice better than a servant, in fact offend her as a worker. Eunice sees herself an employee, as someone who wants to do a job and then be left alone. The old problem of live-in service rears its head: how is it possible for homeowners to grant complete privacy to strangers employed to do menial jobs and who live in their attics? Once upon a time, the Coverdales would have had no trouble staffing Lowfield Hall. Now, though — the book came out in 1977 — they’re thrown back on a woman with serious personality disorders.

For there’s more to Eunice than the inability to read or write. These incompetences mask and symbolize Eunice’s deeper disengagement from normal social life. She is not a sociopath, quite, but her vigilant self-defensiveness and her preference for unobtrusive shadows betray a very damaged character. As does the fact, revealed not far into the story, that she murdered her invalid father by suffocating him with a pillow. She is also a natural blackmailer. Other people, in Eunice’s world, are there to be used.

That is not the outlook of a good servant, or even a bad one. It is the outlook of a creepy person.