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Margaret Jenkins

Margaret Jenkins — Stepping Stones Primary, Hope’s End

Character Profile
Stories Book of Thoth Saga (Vol. I)
Species Human
Status Active
Occupation Teacher, Stepping Stones Primary School
Affiliation Stepping Stones Primary staff; lifelong Hope’s End resident
First Appearance Cambion, Chapter One: Quiet

Margaret Jenkins

“Enough. It is always the two of you.”

Overview

Margaret Jenkins teaches at Stepping Stones Primary and has done for seventeen years. She is a Hope’s End native — grew up in the village, left for teacher training in Sheffield, came back because the job came up and she was, at twenty-four, not yet ready to admit she had left for reasons she could not fully articulate. She has been here ever since. She knows every family in the village going back two generations. She knows which children are cruel by nature and which are cruel by instruction. The distinction matters to her and she applies it consistently. Michael Lawson falls into the second category, which makes her job harder and her patience thinner.

Her voice, when she wants it to, cracks the air. This is her primary classroom-management tool and it works at range. At the bike shed in Chapter One: Quiet, she arrives at pace, takes in the scene — Robert Knight standing, Michael Lawson on the ground, the tooth on the gravel — and turns on Michael and Kevin Sharp with the verdict she has been delivering for two years: It is always the two of you. She is, on the matter of those two, entirely correct.

What she is not expecting is Daniel Marsden stepping into her line of sight and claiming involvement. She weighs the lie — and she knows immediately that it is a lie, because she has known Daniel for two years and he is not a boy who fights — against the blood on the ground, and makes a decision. Then you can explain yourself, too. She sends them to Mrs Davison. This is the correct procedure. The correct procedure, in this instance, takes the two boys she most wants to keep an eye on out of her sight entirely.

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Beyond the Scene

Margaret lives alone in the cottage on Brook Lane she inherited from her aunt in 1989. She does not own a cat, a dog, or a husband, and is the kind of woman the village quietly classifies as having opinions about all three. She marks books at the kitchen table with the radio on low — Radio Four for the news, classical for the long stretches — and goes to bed early on school nights and not much later on the others. Her two indulgences are the book club at Chapel-en-le-Frith Library on the second Wednesday of each month — she drives the seven miles in for it without complaint, and is reliably the harshest critic in the room — and a single glass of cold white wine on Friday nights, which she takes alone in the living room while the heating ticks.

The book club is small — never more than nine, often six. Toby Knight is one of the regulars. Margaret has known he was Robert’s uncle for two years and has never once raised the boy’s name to him. The club is the one place she has agreed with herself that work does not follow her, and she keeps the agreement strictly. She has noted, without commenting on it, that Toby reads more carefully than anyone else in the room and reads in a wider register than she would have expected from a man whose stated occupation is an in-between one she has never quite been able to pin down. She likes him. She does not know him.

Her notes on the children in her class, kept in a hardback A4 ledger she has used since 1993, are far more thorough than anything she has ever filed officially. She spoke privately to Mrs Davison on three occasions about Michael Lawson’s conduct in the two years he was working at Robert. Each time she was told that the matter was being monitored. She had been monitoring it herself for considerably longer, and her notes were more detailed. They still are.

She thinks about Robert Knight more often than she should, given that he is no longer her pupil. There was something she could not place — the way the room felt when he was in it, the quality of his attention when he wasn’t looking at anyone, the silence that gathered around his desk in a way silence does not gather elsewhere. She did not put any of this in the ledger. It did not feel like the kind of observation that ought to be written down. She does not know why. Five years on, she still doesn’t.

Trivia

  • Mrs Jenkins has been on playground duty at the exact moment of every significant Michael Lawson incident at Stepping Stones Primary. This is a coincidence in the sense that all coincidences are coincidences: it happened because the conditions that produce playground incidents and the conditions that put her on duty at those particular lunchtimes are both determined by a rota that has not changed in four years. She is on duty every Tuesday and Thursday. These are also the days Michael is most reliably operational, because his father drives him in on those mornings, which means he arrives in a different mood than on the days he walks.
  • The book she has been pretending to enjoy at the village book club for six weeks is Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. She thinks it is overrated and would prefer not to admit it, because the woman who recommended it is the woman who recommended The English Patient, and Margaret was wrong about that one and has been waiting two years for the chance to be right about something.
  • The radio in her kitchen has been left on Radio Four for so long that the dial has stopped moving freely. She does not see this as a problem.
  • She remembers, sometimes, the way the air felt in the playground the moment before she rounded the bike shed in November 1995 — the unaccountable cold, the way the noise of the children seemed to move through water before it reached her. She has filed this under imagination and weather in equal measure, depending on the day. She has not mentioned it to anyone. It would, she thinks, sound foolish.

Appearances

Title Role Notes
Cambion
Book One · Book of Thoth Saga		 First Responder; Playground Authority First adult on scene at the bike shed incident in Chapter One: Quiet. Disperses the crowd, sends Robert and Daniel to Mrs Davison, directs Mrs Patel to attend to Michael Lawson. Her glare and her verdict — “it is always the two of you” — are the first official framing of the incident, levelled at Michael and Kevin Sharp on long-standing form.