Present Darkness by Malla Nunn Read Free Book Online Page A

European policeman and the liar with a secret family across the colour line might be the reason Lieutenant Mason had read over his personnel file. He might sense something not quite “white” about a policeman born in a slum with no apparent personal life.
    Be careful , Emmanuel thought to himself. Be careful. The words played in his head throughout the long drive to the wealthy bubble of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Here, sandstone churches and elite private schools contrasted with the gospel halls and cinderblock classrooms in Sophiatown. Shade trees and trimmed hedges hid grand houses with sprawling grounds and swimming pools.
    He turned right into Fourth Avenue and then right again into a paved driveway. The night watchman, a veteran of the El Alamein campaign in North Africa, flashed a light into the car then waved Emmanuel through the gates.
    The prime half-acre spread belonged to Elliott King, Davida’s father: a man cunning enough to keep a mixed-race family under one roof while simultaneously sitting at the table with members of the National Party who’d signed the racial segregation rules into law. King managed this feat by maintaining appearances. Europeans slept in the “big house”. A raid by the “immorality squad”, whose job it was to enforce the law forbidding interracial sex, would find the races in perfect balance. White men ups tairs in the big house and brown women in the servant’s hut or in the maid’s room adjacent to the kitchen: a system perfected by the God-fearing Dutchmen who kept black slave wives in the Cape of Good Hope back in the eighteenth century.
    Emmanuel parked at the rear of house and sat for a moment, tired yet fully awake; hungry but for more than food. Contact with Davida and Rebekah would satisfy him. First, he had two difficult phone calls to make.
    *
    He walked the path through masses of pale Madonna lilies and stands of weeping willows. Ahead, a whitewashed hut gleamed in the moonlight. He let himself in, slipped off his shoes and socks and lit a candle. From day one of his transfer to Jo’burg he’d ignored Elliott King’s rules and slept in the hut.
    Tonight, he knew that a stronger man would follow the rules and retreat to the big house so Davida got some rest. A better man would keep the mess of police work separate from his family life.
    Except he felt neither good, nor strong, nor sure that he’d fall asleep before dawn. Images of the ransacked house and the bloodied bodies of the Brewers and the unidentified black man in the garden were too fresh to put away. The sadness in Shabalala’s voice when he’d heard that his son was in police custody was something that Emmanuel would never forget, either. He padded across cool tiles to the bedroom. Davida lay on her side with the cream sheets bunched around her hips, her hair a dark tangle in the candlelight. Rebekah slept cocooned in a yellow wicker basket with a fat baby fist curled against her smooth cheek. She was brown like her mother. My girls, he thought, my beautiful girls.
    Davida eased onto her back and muttered, “Emmanuel … is that you?”
    “Yes.” He lowered the candle. “I didn’t mean to wake you. Go back to sleep.”
    “What’s wrong?” She was half in dreams.
    “Nothing.” He heard the lie in his voice and added, “Nothing that concerns you.”
    “You’re tired.”
    “I am,” he admitted. “It’s late.”
    The thread that connected him to Davida and their little girl remained fragile. Outside of the safety of her father’s private compound, interracial relationships were illegal. The new laws turned their love into something secret and precarious. If they let it, they could both feel the melancholy weight of it hanging between them … Detectives classified as “European” and mixed-race women did mix, but never in public. He didn’t have much to offer Davida in the way of a future.
    “Come on. Get in,” she said in a foggy voice. “Just sleeping. It’s too late