Chapter 5
They went inside and had a cup of punch. One of the wisecracking boys had spiked it with too much whiskey and it was bitter. Peter had never been much of a drinker in Narnia…he glanced in Susan's direction and swallowed most of his glass in a gulp.
He took Katie's hand and steered her by the waist out onto the dance floor. He didn't know if it was the alcohol or the unfamiliar music, but he found he wasn't a grateful dancer at all. Katie tried to lead, but Peter was tripping over his feet. After a couple of songs even she gave up on the dancing and led him over to a sofa.
In this corner of the room boys and girls were sitting together, flirting and kissing. Perhaps more: he didn't exactly strain to see. Peter forced himself to think that Susan was over—well, not by the punch, but somewhere else.
Katie looked up at him. She was pretty, and she hadn't laughed at him even when he was melancholy or danced poorly. Rather, she seemed to like him. He bit his lip, unsure whether he should just plunge in like taking a dive into cold water. He was just drawing in his breath when she revealed that she wanted to talk, at least at first. She told him of how she had fallen in love with the medieval literature she and Susan had been studying in school: Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Lancelot du Lac, and how Susan told her if she loved chivalry "you should meet my brother Peter. He'd be perfect for you."
"I see what she means," Katie said with a bashful blush. "I wish there were still knights errant and ladies…I should so wish to be one."
Peter smiled indulgently, but in his head he said "You are lovely, but you are not a queen." Then it struck him that he was no king either. Not here. The powerful loneliness of his exile swept over him. At the same time he felt bad for Katie and he envied her; she had never seen the truth that was just behind a wardrobe door, but at the same time, she could not miss as powerfully what she never had in the first place. Yet still, if Susan didn't understand at least Katie did to some measure, and he kissed her because he didn't want to feel so separate anymore.
When her lips parted and her arms slid around his neck, Peter felt a pull from somewhere around the bottom of his navel, like a hook pulling him closer to her (though she was close enough already). He started to give in to the heady rush; it allowed him to forget for a second, but then he remembered her saying "knights errant" and he saw the tapestry of himself that had hung in the war room at Cair Paravel. He had posed for it when he was fresh from the Northern Frontier and a victory against the giants. He had just reached the bloom of manhood, the age he supposedly was now in a more prosaic England. The weavers had been far too generous to be sure, using real silver thread to highlight his chain mail, and exaggerating the handsomeness in his profile and the nobility in his face. In the tapestry, the High King stared off with hard, glittering eyes and a smile playing on his lips, exuding power, and joy, and honor. Victory hung over his shoulders like a mantle. Peter didn't actually believe the tapestry was entirely accurate, but he had loved it because it reminded him how much his subjects loved and admired him. He had been so honored that anyone could think of him like that he hung it in the war room to remind himself not only of what he had to be in battle, but those he went off to defend.
Now he was kissing some girl who loved those very same things in a damp corner of a Clapham basement. He found he couldn't do it. He couldn't become like those other boys and talk idly of rugby and unfinished lives. Pulling away from Katie so suddenly was cruel, but he knew that giving up all sense of chivalry would be crueler still. To the both of them. He left the party, praying that at least Derek had enough sense and honor to see Susan home.