Small Affairs on the Estate
The Earl told Raymond he could stay on
at the old Estate house Joe and Cissie
brought him up in, with two sisters and three
brothers who went seeking love and money.
But, being just the quid-an-hour man who
hoed gravel for the families in new houses
on Ted Sant’s field (near the dip that flooded),
Raymond let paint flake and gutters fall.
He baked pies in his mother’s tins and sliced
them with her wedding knife, brewed thin tea
in the crusted pot and ate redcurrants raw.
At night he gazed across the purple slopes
he’d searched for curlews’ eggs those afternoons
he skipped arithmetic, then squeaked the unlit
stairs to bed and lay forgetting till
slow dawns he sometimes did not notice broke.
What was it made him leave his house and walk
before the sun was fully up to fall
amongst the pine cones where the Earl would
find him when he strolled that way at nine?
Some said the instinct of a countryman
who knows these things as dogs do. Others thought
it might have been the mantel clock, its tick
and chime, the weight in his hand of the key.
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