1 Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

"JOHN," Gill started the conversation rolling.

Everyone at the bank referred to John Jacob Nicholls as John. It was his given first name after all, although his family always called him by an abbreviation of his middle name, as both his late uncle and grandfather had been Johns. His great grandfather was a Jacob, the fourth in line with that name, so were a number of uncles and, strangely enough, even a couple of great-aunts shared it as a middle name.

There was no way that Gill would have known any of that, of course.

"Everyone tells me that you are the person to ask," continued Gill, a little nervously. Usually so decisive, the department head was clearly out of her element here.

"Ask me what?" Jake looked up from filing his daily copy logs in a ring binder, and concentrated his warm brown eyes, smiling expectantly at her.

'Oh my god,' the thought almost escaped her lips, 'he looks like a cute puppy!' She so wanted to kiss him and clutch his slim, hard body to her breast. She cleared her throat, 'Concentrate, girl!'

John Jacob Nicholls, or Jake to his family, had a thing about Gillian Jarvis. He always had, ever since he first saw her. She started working at the Standhope Winter merchant bank, off Cornhill, deep in the heart of the City of London, twelve years ago. This was about two years after Jake began working in what was then known as the copy/fax room.

When she commenced working at the bank, Gill Jarvis only worked part-time, as she still had two young children in nursery, and, as office gopher, she visited the copy room several times a day. Jake got to know her quite well, which only reinforced his initial positive feelings towards her. Okay, he noticed the wedding band on her finger almost immediately and soon found out that she also had two young children. That didn't concern him, or affect his friendly relationship with her, as designs on her affections were quite the last thing on his mind.

Even if Gillian Jarvis had been single he would have been reluctant to approach her with any romantic expectations, in fact, to approach any woman in that respect was at that time considered by him to be impossible anyway.

But that was when he first knew her, would Jake make a move now, so many years later, if they were both single?

In the January update of the company telephone list, that Jake had printed out and circulated a couple of months earlier, the entry 'Gillian Jarvis assistant manager enterprise asset management division' had disappeared and a new entry, 'Gillian Moorhouse manager enterprise asset management division' appeared instead, a page or two further down the alphabetical list. Jake noted that she was taking the opportunity of her latest promotion to revise her surname.

Gill was what you would call petite, about 5 foot 3 inches tall, and naturally of slim build. Her hair was dark brown, thick, wavy and shoulder length. Her face was open and generally cheerful, with deep brown eyes, an upward curling mouth and the faintest cleft in her chin. She was pretty by any standards but Jake thought she was singularly beautiful. She was an efficient worker, had performed well in banking and management examinations, and had exceeded expectations in each of the bank positions she had undertaken in her career to date. Jake thought she could go all the way to the top and he was aware that others held the same opinion.

Jake was about six inches taller and also slim, perhaps a little too slim, most of his acquaintance might suggest. He too, had an open countenance and was noticeably bright and attentive. He always dressed smartly and was extremely cool under pressure, he never let anyone down. Most of the girls, and some of the guys too, thought Jake was handsome, but he always fended off amorous advances. The girls assumed therefore that he was gay, while the gays were under no illusions that he was anything other than straight.

When he first started working at the private merchant bank, the copy room managed to carry a busy staff of four, with the room populated by a complex assortment of telex machines, faxes of different resolutions and speeds as well as a range of the latest photocopiers. Now he was the only print room technician manning the department, the telexes and fax machines having long gone and the staff to operate them departed with them. There were slightly more multitasking copiers, which acted as scanners and computer printers of various sizes, and binding equipment than before, but the degree of automation meant they were a lot less labour-intensive. Jake also stocked general office stationery and he scanned archive copies of documentation for the bank. He had now been in the same basic but continually evolving job for about fourteen years.

Gill was aware of the fact that Jake was not actually employed directly by the bank any more, but worked for a separate facilities management company, which leased and maintained their own copying equipment. That policy had been put in place shortly after Gill started at the bank and the move was thought to have brought benefits in cost savings and efficiency. In theory, Gill thought, if Jake's little department was closed at the bank, his company could move him onto another managed facility; in practice though, in the current economic and banking crisis, she thought he would probably be laid off.

Gill had headed up a successful cross-department committee, looking into cost-cutting and efficient reduction of overheads throughout the bank a couple of years previously. It was their recommendation that the print department be shut down entirely, with the bank staff forced to do their own copying and printing, on cheaper desktop machines, in addition to their normal duties. However, the top management at the bank had, after due consideration, vetoed her committee's recommendations without supplying any supporting arguments for overriding the recommendation.

There was nothing personal in Gill's assessment of the cost-cutting exercise, it was purely economics. She had liked the young John Nicholls from the moment when she was first required to pop into the copy shop half a dozen times a day. The older staff in the room were generally always rude, negative and annoyingly vague about when her jobs would be ready. As the office junior she had no seniority and her jobs were often bumped down in order of priority, causing her to waste time making fruitless journeys and adding anxiety to her other pressures.

John was always the most approachable member of the old copy shop team. He gave precise promises when her request would be ready and would come up with helpful suggestions in mitigation when schedules were too tight for him to meet in their entirety. He was always bright and cheerful, in fact with his potential, Gill thought early on, John Nicholls was wasted in the copy shop. Even when she visited occasionally, noting his efficient and economic bustle, she remained of that opinion, although her opportunities to see him became increasingly limited the higher up the promotion ladder she climbed.

When the print room inevitably closed, as she was convinced in time it would, she determined that she would seek to find a place for him in her department and realise the potential she recognised. As far as she was concerned, the bank really couldn't downsize any more than they had over the past two years.

In contrast to Jake's apparent immobility, tied as he was to the Print Room, as it was now labelled, Gill had made significant career progress in the bank and was now a firmly respected member of the senior management team. This in effect meant that Jake had seen less and less of her in his domain over the past few years and had long ago resigned himself to continue observing her from a distance. His feelings for her hadn't diminished one iota over the years.

So, he was quite pleasantly surprised to see Gill - indeed it was unusual to see anyone at all at that early hour - just three minutes past seven in the morning.

As usual the print room office door was wide open to show that they were open for business, with a stack of the previous day's jobs ready for collection, piled up by custom on the table near the door. Jake had only been in for a few minutes and he was still in the process of getting the equipment switched on and warmed up, when he looked up and there she was, standing in the doorway, quietly watching him while he worked.

It was still far too early for the rest of the office workers. Jake usually arrived at least an hour or so earlier than the bank staff, in order to sort out any prints that had appeared in the delivery trays overnight, so they were ready to collect or deliver as appropriate first thing.

Gill stood there empty-handed with her usual brilliant welcoming smile, while hesitating to declare what was on her mind. Jake swapped a ready smile with her and continued to bustle round the office, waiting for Gill to say what she had come to say. She clearly wasn't carrying anything she wanted him to copy, and there was nothing in the overnight prints addressed to her, nor anything urgent for her department.

While he busied himself around the office, he stole the occasional glance in her direction and realised how much slimmer she was since the last time he had seen her just a few weeks before. She was 36 now, he knew, three years older than he was, and her weight had crept up ever so slightly over the years, he had noticed by his close observations. However, in quite a short space of time, since Christmas he thought, she appeared to have lost all that excess, without appearing gaunt. She looked good, very good in fact.

She was similarly noticing how slim and athletic he looked and even this early in the spring season his skin appeared to have a tanned and healthy glow. Jake had a good-looking boyish face, he could've passed for twenty, but she knew he must be late twenties at least, he had worked at the bank as long as she had, maybe even longer. He might even be as old as thirty, she mused, a gap between them of around six years. Would that be too big a gap? 'Yes,' she thought sadly, 'it probably would.' She had just lost her marriage, she wouldn't want to compound that shame by losing every scrap of her dignity as well.

He was much too young for her then, she thought, but instantly dismissed the very thought as a silly idea, he had never showed the slightest hint of romantic interest in her. Nor had he appeared to show interest any of the girls in the office. He was simply equally friendly with everyone, it seemed, without going over the top.

Gill knew for a fact that over the years more than a couple of handfuls of the single girls, and she was certainly aware of one married woman, who had tried their luck tipping their hats in his direction, without him taking the slightest notice of any offer. They were all sure he was still single, as he never brought a date to any of the bank's social functions, although she wasn't sure about last Christmas, as that was the first one that she and her ex-husband Wayne had missed. Anyway, the rumour among the young single ladies in Gill's department, accompanied by deep meaningful sighs, was that John Nicholls was, unfortunately, almost certainly gay.

His dark, almost black hair was always neat, cut quite short with a partly receding hairline at the front and a slight bald patch appearing on the crown of his head. He only really lacked a drooping moustache to tip him firmly into the gay category, Gill surmised.

Interrupting her thoughts just then, Jake had to reach over one of the printers at the back wall of the print room to grab a binder from a shelf. Gill's eyes were instantly drawn to the smoothly rounded shape of his buns as he stretched his body to reach.

Gill tore her eyes away and tried to focus on the 'In Case of Fire' notice on the wall.

'Christ!' she thought, 'I must be on fire! I'm so sexually frustrated that I'm actually checking out a gay boy's cute bum!'

She remembered all too vividly that the last time she had sex was a furtive quickie that she felt extremely guilty about at Christmas, almost three and a half months before. It was a rather unsatisfactory reconciliation-romp with Wayne, her ex-husband. That had been a total disaster, which meant the last meaningful sex she had had was the previous summer, although even that session and maybe the dozen or so before that had been pretty awful. As that was some time before she was aware of Wayne's long-established affair, the gloss was taken right off most of the experiences of her marriage, other than the births of her two children.

'Get real girl,' Gill forcefully said to herself, 'ask him what you came for and get out of this office and back onto safer ground.'

"John," she started, "everyone tells me that you are the person to ask," she continued, a little nervously.

"Ask me what?" Jake looked up from filing his daily copy logs in his binder, and concentrated his warm brown eyes, smiling expectantly at her.

"Well, I have a couple of inactive teenagers at home and, since Christmas, I have been trying to lick them into shape."

'Oh dear, maybe "lick" wasn't the best word to use here,' she thought, especially as she felt more and more like licking him all over. Gill was so wishing he was not gay and that he had an hitherto unrecognised fetish about older divorcees, especially about one older divorcee in particular who had been working her butt off in the gym for months to get even vaguely back in shape.

She pulled herself together and continued, "I have them eating better food while they are at home with me, but I just can't get them to do any exercise at all. I've even taken out a rather pricey family membership at my local gym but neither of them will get off their backsides and make use of it. Any suggestions, John?"

While talking, her hands had moved expressively, pleadingly, but now she had finished what she wanted to say, she folded her arms across her chest, below her breasts, an unconsciously challenging stance for him to provide an answer.

Jake remembered both her children quite well and had taken a keen interest in them at the time when he used to see them reasonably often, although somewhat irregularly. When Gill first started as a part-timer in the bank, she sometimes had to bring them into work when she had been let down by school holiday childminders, or if school was closed for inset days. Once she was employed full-time and rapidly gaining promotion after promotion, they came in less frequently for a while, and then not at all.

'The girl was Jenny,' he thought, delving back into his memories, 'a girl as pretty and petite as her mother, and would be about 15 or 16 now I guess; the boy was a couple of years younger and big for his age, called Carl, no not Carl, but something similar.'

When Gill used to bring her children to the bank, which didn't have a crèche back then, they would spend most of their time in the copy room, where there were benches, pens and markers and plenty of spare scrap paper to write or draw on and it didn't matter if they made a bit of a noise in there. Jenny was a nice kid, quiet and almost as shy as Jake, and the boy, whatever name he answered to, was clumsy, chatty, boisterous, loud and, back then, could be trouble with a capital T if his interest wasn't fully engaged.

"I think I remember them," Jake said, "Jenny and ...?" he hesitated.

"Clay," filled in Gill, "short for Clayton."

"So, what do they do now and what things are they particularly interested in?" Jake asked.

Gill moved one of her hands to stroke her chin, leaving the other arm across her chest.

"Jenny stays in her room most evenings, finishing her homework, watching her own television and texting her friends; at the weekends she normally hangs around with her pals at the town centre. Clay also goes to his room straight after dinner, to play on his games consoles, and he hardly goes out at all; if friends do come over, they just hang out in his room, playing games. I am worried that Jen doesn't quite eat enough and Clay eats far too much of the wrong things without taking any exercise. Neither of them are interested in sport or keeping fit and when they stay with their father, they tell me that they all just sit around and eat bought-in junk food ... their er, new step-mother doesn't cook much, if at all."

Gill paused, just as the print room phone rang.

"Excuse me," Jake apologised with a smile and picked up the handset before it rang a second time.

Gill watched him as he listened to the caller, a smile playing on his lips all the while as he nodded silently. Gill had to think back to when she had ever seen John without a smile on his face and she realised she couldn't. It was as if he was an extremely slimmed down but completely serene Buddha.

Jake nestled the phone between his chin and shoulder as he stood at a computer screen on the back bench and rattled away at the keyboard, uttering the odd affirmative and then "no problem".

Gill could hear the rasping voice at the other end of the line and thought she heard John referred to as 'Jake' several times and the word 'password'.

Listening to John's voice, Gill thought it was a pleasantly deep baritone, not at all gay sounding. He spoke with perfect diction too, unexpected for an unskilled worker. 'Well, that's what copy technicians were, weren't they?' she thought. The cleaners at the bank, for example, had distinctly London East End accents.

And Jake's telephone voice was exactly the same as his normal conversational voice. It was clear to Gill that he had received a good education and probably came from a good family.

Gill realised that she really didn't know anything about him at all. She was curious why John Nicholls wasn't on the bank's management training circuit that she herself had worked through so successively, despite having taken time out from her career for her children.

Jake finished his call saying, "I've changed your password to 'monday14' all lowercase Gerry, so you'll need to change it again immediately." Jake paused for a moment and finished with "Bye", replaced the receiver and grinned at Gill.

"Was that Gerald?" asked Gill, the chairman of the board of the bank being the only 'Gerry' that she could think of in the company, not that she would ever call him Gerry, ever.

"Yes, he's always forgetting his computer password. Now, what games does Clay play on his console?"

Gill was still absorbing the earlier conversation, "Why didn't Gerald..." she couldn't bring herself to call him 'Gerry' even in private, "call IT?"

"Because," replied Jake, looking at the big clock on the wall, "they don't start work for another 35 minutes and Gerry doesn't like using the out of hours service. To be honest, nobody does.... Now, I bet Clay is really into 'Stand or Attack 4'?"

Gill still couldn't get Gerald Standhope out of her head, 'why would Gerald ring John or was he Jake, the print room ex-copy boy, for help with getting into his computer?'

Jake waited patiently for Gill to ask the next question, but as the pause extended he jumped in by way of explanation to her, anyway.

"I expect Gerry needs to download and translate the interim figures for Societé Transport de Paris SA, which will be announced on the Paris Stock Exchange an hour before they are released in London, due to the time difference."

"But he called you Jake instead of John and you called him Gerry instead of Gerald. Why?"

"That's because he's fam- er just familiarity, you know, because I've known him since before he became the top man here, before you started at the bank. Now, is Clay into 'Stand or Attack 4'?"

"Oh, er, yes, I think he got that for his birthday last month, but I'm not sure. Whatever he got, his father bought for him." She continued, "I got him some trousers for school, it was then I noticed how much weight he had put on, as his waist had gone up another size."

"Hence the need to keep Clay active?"

"Yes, I hardly seem to see them these days, just a snatched meal before they disappear to their rooms, and then they are with their father every other weekend," she said wistfully. "We hardly function as a family any more," she realised. "What do you do to keep in such good shape?"

She had said much more than she intended and looked at Jake to see if he was reading anything into what sounded to her like tacit admittance that she found him attractive. Jake smiled broadly at her with a sparkle in his eyes. She hoped he wasn't laughing at her. The way she felt about her self-image was at such a low ebb at the moment that she couldn't bear being treated as a joke, or even worse, as someone to be pitied for her marriage failure.

Jake saw her slight discomfort, interpreting this as worry about her offsprings' health, put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Looks like you need something that you can all do as a family together, what do you think about hiking and camping?"

Gill was startled, she wasn't expecting this as an answer to her request for suggestions. She had asked all the girls in her office and had various ideas like getting a family gym membership, which she had done without success, swimming, racket games, weekends at country club-like resorts. But camping? No-one had said anything about hiking and camping in the great outdoors. And the promise of a fine spring was virtually round the corner.

Jake continued, "Or if camping is out of the question you can hike between fantastic country pubs, hotels or even B&Bs."

Gill's mind was suddenly racing with the idea. She used to go on lots of hiking and camping holidays with her family when she was a girl and even did a little hiking and hostelling at college with a group of girls who were similarly inclined. However, she had packed all that delightful activity up when she started going out with Wayne. He was into ten-pin bowling on Friday nights and had a football season ticket at Stamford Bridge, which wiped out more than half of each weekend. One of the reasons that Wayne and Clay never really bonded as father and son was because Wayne was hardly ever there at the weekend to encourage Clay to take up any kind of sporting activity.

"There are also plenty of opportunities to do short walks which can be fitted into a morning and or an afternoon without bothering with all that camping paraphernalia," Jake continued, consulting his iPhone calendar. "There's a nice gentle one this coming Sunday for young families, which would be an ideal starter, if you are interested. It is only a ten mile drive or so out of London."

"Sorry, I was miles away just thinking about camping," Gill said, smiling. "This is a great idea," she enthused, "A chance to exercise, get plenty of fresh air, build up an appetite for good, wholesome food and indulge in some family bonding, too."

'Well,' she thought to herself, 'everyone said John would have the answer and, damn it, they were right on the button!'

Just then came a voice from the doorway, calling out, "Fourteen across 'queen exists, again', four letters, any ideas?"

Gill turned and nodded in greeting to David Sullivan, one of the Eurobond negotiators, poking his head round the doorway, addressing Jake.

Jake grinned, replying "Isis, which means 'she of the throne' and 'is'-'is' for 'exists, repeats again'. You finished it now, Dave?"

"No, not quite, John," admitted Dave, "but I'll see where this clue gets me, speak to you later. Oh, hi Gill," and with a wave he was off.

Gill turned to look at Jake, with a quizzical look on her face.

"Dave buys his Telegraph at the station and fills it in on the train, I have mine delivered at home early and do the crossword during breakfast," said Jake by way of explanation. "I'll email the location of Sunday's walk and a list of what I think you'll need. The circuit returns to the pub car park at lunchtime and again at the end of the afternoon so you won't have to lug the picnic around with you. Or you can lunch in the pub. Also, if the kids are too tired by the time you get to midday you can always give the afternoon walk a miss."

"Sounds great," said Gill. "I'm definitely up for it. I take it you don't bother to go on the beginners' walks?"

"My grandmother organises these particular rambles and there is a wide range of age groups present from toddlers up to pensioners, even the odd babe in arms, too. They are very gentle strolls rather than hikes; say up to three hours in the morning and two to two-and-a-half after lunch. I do usually attend these sessions, as my grandmother hates to drive, so I take her. She has them about once a month between spring and autumn."

---

It was a glorious Sunday and, with the minimum of coercing, Gill had managed to drag along both Jenny and Clay. At home during the week Gill had printed out the map that Jake had already emailed to her computer by the time she had got back to her desk on Monday. He followed it up with directions to the car park and approximate itinerary of this particular trip. The walk was designed for young families with quite young children and consisted of mainly pavement or tarmac'd paths and wasn't too taxing for beginners.

Gill had looked out her old hiking boots, polished off the layer of dust and had worn them round the house for a couple of evenings to soften them up ready for the walk. Jenny and Clay wore their everyday trainers. Gill thought that if they were going to take longer walks together and even camp out, she would have to kit them out properly. She might suggest that Wayne could contribute this element to the children's welfare, as he was the reason for Clay putting on weight and Jenny's depression. Jake had listed suggestions for lunch and that they bring plenty of drinking water, Gill had packed all this in a cool box in the car.

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