AN EXPLORATION OF PENGELLY Cove didn’t take a great deal of time. After the shop and the two main streets, there was either the cove itself, an old church sitting just outside of town, or the Curlew Inn to occupy one’s time. Once she was left alone in the village, Daidre began with the church. She reckoned it might be locked up tight, as so many country churches were in these days of religious indifference and vandalism, but she was wrong. The place was called St. Sithy’s, and it was open, sitting in the middle of a graveyard where the remains of this year’s daffodils still lined the paths, giving way to columbine.
Within, the church smelled of stones and dust, and the air was cold. There was a switch for lights just inside the door, and Daidre used this to illuminate a single aisle, a nave, and a collection of multicoloured ropes that looped down from the bell tower. A roughly hewn granite baptismal font stood to her left, while to her right, an unevenly placed stone aisle led to pulpit and altar. It could have been any church in Cornwall save for one difference: an honesty stall. This comprised a table and shelves just beyond the baptismal font, and upon it used goods were for sale, with a locked wooden box serving as the till.
Daidre went to inspect all this and found no organisation to it but rather a quirky charm. Old lace mats mingled with the odd bit of porcelain; glass beads hung from the necks of well-used stuffed animals. Books eased away from their spines; cake plates and pie tins offered garden tools instead of sweets. There was even a shoe box of historic postcards, which she flipped through to see that most of them were already written upon, stamped, and received long ago. Among them was a depiction of a gipsy caravan, of the sort she hadn’t seen in years: rounded on the top and gaily painted, celebrating a peripatetic life. Unexpectedly, her vision blurred when she picked up this card. Unlike so many of the others, nothing had been written upon it.
She wouldn’t have done so at another time, but she bought the card. Then she bought two others with messages on them: one from an Auntie Hazel and Uncle Dan that depicted fishing boats in Padstow Harbour and another from Binkie and Earl showing a line of surfers standing in front of long Malibu boards that were upright in the Newquay sand. Fistral Beach scrolled across their feet, and this was apparently the location where?according to either Binkie or Earl?It happened here!!!! Wedding’s next December!
With these in her possession, Daidre left the church. But not before she looked at the prayer board, where members of the congregation posted their requests for collective appeals to their mutual deity. Most of these had to do with health, and it came to Daidre how seldom people seemed to consider their God unless physical illness descended upon them or upon someone they loved.
She was not religious, but here was an opportunity, she realised, to step up to the spiritual cricket pitch. The God of chance was bowling and she stood in front of the wicket with the bat in her hands. To swing or not and what did it matter? were the issues before her. She’d been searching the Internet for miracles, hadn’t she? What was this but another arena in which a miracle might be found?
She picked up the biro provided and a slip of paper, which turned out to be part of the back of an old handout on which a bake sale was being advertised. She flipped this to the blank side and she started to write. She got as far as Please pray for, but she found that she could advance no further. She couldn’t find the words to shape her request because she wasn’t even sure it was her request. So to write it and then to post it on a board for prayers proved too monumental a task, one that was coloured by a hypocrisy that she could not bear to live with. She replaced the pen, balled up the slip of paper and shoved it into her pocket. She left the church.