Forgetfulness by Ward Just Page B

what to do with himself of an afternoon. A single glass of wine at lunch, a book, a nap, tea at four o'clock, a stroll before dinner. Granger swung on a tight compass, having seen as much of the world as he cared to see. He was not tempted by pyramids or South Sea islands. He believed the world was overrated. All a man needed was his health, a comfortable house, his books, and a billiards table on which the varieties of experience were near infinite. He laced his talk with billiards expressions, angle shots, balance points, bad hits, corner hooks, feather shots, force-follows, time shots, table runs. He believed restlessness was the enemy of achievement—not that he valued achievement. Granger called himself a species of ghost and that was surely true. He cast no shadow on the earth, and an evening's conversation over the billiards table, broken as it was by interminable silences, seemed to halt time itself.
Granger had had one profound experience as a young man and spent the rest of his life feeding off it, existing in a realm where experience was irrelevant. His life was a kind of force-follow, extreme overspin with a hesitation when it encountered resistance. Thomas laughed suddenly, looking at the elephants and thinking about Granger.
    Do you know, Granger said one night, that no American has won the world three-cushion billiards championship since 1936?
    No, I didn't know that.
    Belgians have won it twelve times. Not one American. Or Englishman either. One German.
    Why do you suppose that is, Granger?
    Granger, sighting an angle shot over his left knuckle, waited a moment before replying. Too much war experience, Thomas. Too little patience.
    Captain St. John Granger had been with Allenby's Third Army at La Boisselle, July 1, 1916, the worst day of the war, a German-expressionist horror from sunup to dusk. Along the salient that day there were 58,000 casualties including 20,000 dead, the numbers rounded off because no one had a precise count. Bodies disappeared, blown to pieces or lost in the mud. On July 2, Captain Granger crawled out of a hole and began walking. The battlefield was shrouded in early morning mist the color and density of pearls. The air smelled of fish. Granger glided over the scarred and barren terrain of no man's land, stepping carefully to avoid the corpses and pieces of corpses. He was bound for the British lines. No one noticed him and in his shock and confusion Granger believed he had become invisible. He had become one with the thick and swirling mist and so he continued unchallenged through the lines and the headquarters behind the lines. Aid stations gave way to hospitals that gave way to makeshift morgues. The fish smell grew stronger with each step he took. Granger walked across the hills until, that evening, he found himself in Albert, clad now in the blue work clothes of a French peasant. The day after that he was in Amiens, and that night in Paris, well turned out in a light-colored suit and a
straw boater. He dined at Fouquet's and went home with a girl. The next week he was in Geneva, arranging a transfer of funds, a more complicated business than it might seem because by then he was reported missing in action and presumed dead. His brother, Adrian, worked for a bank in the City of London and so the transfer was made, but made most reluctantly because his banker brother did not believe in desertion in time of war, a scandalous affair, the coward's way out, letting down the side. Thank God our father and mother are gone, they could not have borne your disgrace. What will you do now? St. John said nothing, listening to his brother's voice as if it were a stranger's overheard in a railway car or on the street. He was neither insulted nor angry. He was certainly not chastened. He was indifferent to his brother's opinions because they were unearned. His brother had never seen a trench, an aid station, a morgue, or an armed enemy. He knew that in the end Adrian would comply, and in the