The Sugared Game - K.J. Charles Page 0,16
“No, darling, a juvenile. An actor who plays delightful young men, so his feet are very firmly planted on this side of twenty-five. Johnnie Cheveley was awfully cross about it, but he would be.”
Will was well used to the flood of names that meant nothing to him. It became oddly soothing after a while, like the Shipping Forecast on the radio. “Who’s Johnnie Cheveley, and why was he cross?”
“Oh, well, darling, that’s a long story. Who he is, I mean, not why he was cross. That’s a very short story: he didn’t want to go. He said the High-Low was a rotten place and Gloria said he’d enjoyed it well enough before, and there was very nearly a fight when Binkie and Gloria went off to meet a friend of theirs. I say friend; Gloria looked awfully refreshed afterwards, if you take my meaning.”
“Would the friend have been on the upper balcony, at all?”
“I think he might have been, because Johnnie was very unkind about her breaking her neck coming back down the stairs. Not that she did of course. Well, you know she didn’t.”
“I do?”
“Darling, you know her!”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes you do, she’s in the pictures. She was in that thing with Louise Brooks last month as the girl who wouldn’t, and the one with the man with the hair.”
Incredibly, this brought a face to Will’s mind. “Oh, her. Right. Yes, I’ve seen her a few times.”
“I hope not in the High-Low,” Phoebe said. “She really ought to be more discreet. But it still isn’t Johnnie’s business.”
The waiter arrived with their first courses. Will waited for him to stop making puppy eyes at Phoebe and clear off before asking, “So why’s this Cheveley fellow on your mind?”
“You are clever, darling.” Phoebe took a sip of her soup. “He wants me to marry him.”
“You’re engaged. To Kim, I grant you, but still engaged.”
“Darling, I know! It’s too absurd. The thing is—can I bore you with the story? You see, his family and ours are connected, and I was desperately in love with him when I was quite little. He was in Signals in the war and I embarrassed us both writing him heartfelt letters. And by the time he came back his father and oldest brother had died, in that order so the death duties were iniquitous, and everything that’s left went to the second brother to keep the house up. Johnnie was the third son, so he doesn’t have anything at all and he has to work. He was furiously angry about that, but Daddy offered him a post as his secretary, with a generous salary and plenty of free time so he could live as he used to. I met him a great deal, and he was always terribly offhanded with me, which I very stupidly took as a challenge. I was rather wild then, and a dreadful fool in a lot of ways. We all were, I suppose. You know what it’s been like since the war, with parties and everything changing.”
Will’s post-war experience had not included parties, but you couldn’t miss the rules being rewritten all over. “Mmm.”
“Anyway, eventually—well, I was very silly and careless and got badly in trouble, and Daddy made Johnnie a generous offer if he’d marry me. But what with one thing and another he refused, which was quite his right, of course, but he wasn’t kind about it. Not kind at all.” She was looking over Will’s shoulder then, not meeting his eyes. “And Kim was. He was the only person who didn’t tell me how dreadful I’d been. Of course he was in disgrace himself, so he knew how it felt. He offered me his hand and I said yes and told my parents, but then the—well, the pressing need to get married didn’t come about, you know. But after all that, I rather felt like staying engaged for a while, and of course it’s useful for Kim. So we were privately engaged for a few months, and we got on so marvellously that I thought, why not stick to it and get married?”
“I can think of a couple of reasons,” Will said, with some understatement.
“Perhaps, darling, but you aren’t in my position. So we announced it last summer and planned to marry this summer. And then, quite unexpectedly, Johnnie proposed to me at Christmas, and he hasn’t stopped since.”
Will blinked. Phoebe made a comical face, but her eyes weren’t laughing. “He’s proposed five times. In two months! He keeps