Susan doesn't like birthdays, especially not her own. Peter thinks her singular, Edmund silly, Lucy sweet, if misguided. But Susan finds all of it, the pageantry, the attention, the presents, a curious mixture of the macabre and the embarrassing, specifically concocted for her especial pain and humiliation.
She thinks that it is unspeakably sad to celebrate the progressive yearly loss of innocence, the perennial march to the grave.
Even if there is cake.
She turns twelve in England. It is a small, unassuming affair--the war puts pocket money, and therefore gifts, in short supply--but her mother and siblings do their best to make the day a memorable one. Mother gives her a prettily bound, if slightly battered copy of Jane Austen's Persuasion; Peter shyly presents her with a small sewing kit, complete with thimble to negate the threat of the pointy pins; Lucy neatly tucks a prized dolly, one of many, "Helen" in name, into Susan's bed (Lucy says that "she's beautiful, like you, Su"); and though Edmund made a great show of snobbishly neglecting to present her with a gift at breakfast with the others, at lunchtime Susan finds some rather smushy chocolates--no doubt from Edmund's super-secret hoard--underneath her napkin. Mum toasts her "young woman" with misty eyes and Susan, ever the lady, delicately sips her thinned milk with a small obligatory self-conscious smile on her lips.
Her sixteenth is as different from her twelfth as one can imagine. This time around she is hailed as a Queen, forced to endure the deferential posturing of diplomats and courtiers as well as the well-intentioned smothering of her fellow rulers. It is a national holiday, and the gifts pour in all day, seemingly, endless, silks and perfumes of Calormen, wines and metals of Terebinthia, spices and flowers of Galma . . . it is both fascinating and terrifying to Susan, who is simultaneously flattered and shocked by the appalling waste. She immediately inventories and has Peridan arrange to distribute the goods among her subjects, but not even that can cleanse her of the nagging sensation that she is an imposter, and moreover one who neither asked for nor deserves these dubious honours.
And of course there's to be a ball--all Lucy--which is the only reason there's to be a ball at all; no one, least of all Susan, can say no to Lucy's doe-like sparkling eyes. At the gaudy event she receives no less than three proposals, all varying widely in poetic merit, and all from men of "questionable intentions," in Peter's words. Susan wonders how, exactly, anyone desiring to marry a wealthy young Queen can have any other than questionable intentions, and tells him so.
Peter clasps her indignant shoulder for a moment and sends her down the dance with a very slightly tipsy, and not at all over-excited, Tumnus. He wishes that he knew the answer to her question, for her sake.
It may or may not be Tumnus's fault, but Susan has her first encounter with the vices of strong drink that night. She downs two gobletfuls (in ladylike small sips, of course) of the highly concentrated spiced wine (Mrs. Beaver's special family recipe) and wakes up feeling as if she has been ramming her skull against the stone wall for twelve hours. At minimum.
Edmund, slouching against the wall, disheveled in last night's tunic, laughs at her low tolerance for alcohol, but she cannot do more than glare, too woozy to scream at him for being so abominably loud. Lucy shoos, him still snorting, into the corridor, and reads her sister several passionate reiterations of the last night's matrimonial offers. Susan almost thinks that Ed's ridicule would be less offensive to her throbbing headache.
She swears that she will never touch wine again--never, never (Edmund smugly points out that she hasn't ruled out mulled mead)--for she can't remember anything after the cheese course, and half the Cair's courtiers--Tumnus included--won't really look her in the eye for a week.
But even her best intentions cannot keep Ed, he of the cast-iron skull and even harder heart, from gleefully introducing her to everyone who will listen as "Queen Susan the Teetotaler." She laughs along, all Graceful Good Humour, and everyone present is put at ease, but afterwards she discretely slips the court historian a nice bonus. Some things simply do not need to be recorded for posterity, her lovely nickname included.
After her eighteenth birthday she decides to stop keeping track. The Teetotaling has been a rather brilliant success--she keeps away from strong drink at all times, but especially on her birthday; if she's going to celebrate her annual deterioration, she reasons, she might as well be lucid while she's at it. As a result, Ed has only one mortifying story to tell about her, and she--and half of Narnia, actually; Edmund gets around, and Bacchus likes to name-drop--have countless recollections of his drunken escapades to recount. He never quite makes a total fool of himself, because he's Edmund, too serene, too collected for that, even when intoxicated, but she has only to mention their elder brother--threaten enlightening the High King as to some of his more interesting experiences--and Ed is a puppet at her disposal.
And why does Peter really need to know? She hopes that that's not treason. (If it was that probably wouldn't stop her, though.)
The worst bit of this birthday business is getting rid of the blasted (she never says that part aloud but surely it can't hurt to think it sometimes) suitors. Every year, every ball, their numbers seem to multiply, like cockroaches, and despite her best efforts to ward them away from the festivities--the threat of military force, Lucy's dagger, cloves of garlic in all the beds, even using the determined little buggers as target practice for archery--nothing is effectual. They seep in the corners and niches of the palace walls, pop up behind ornamental shrubbery at inopportune moments, and swing from the curtains like wild animals. She can feel a migraine coming on.
And they wonder why she doesn't care for most male company.
The stress wears on them all: Peter stomps around through the castle brandishing his sword at offending tapestries, Lucy trains an army of Squirrels to throw nuts at the tireless suitors (it doesn't work; for whatever reason, the suitors find this very amusing), and Edmund snickers in the shadows, brandishing a flagon of something that is almost certainly not water. He offers Susan a swig.
And just this once, she takes it.