An exception to the usual rule

As a postscript to my comments about the platonic, collegial mood that prevailed at our tennis parties, one couple conspicuously departed from that generalization. They weren't regulars. I'd known her for years but she was on the fringe of my friendship network and played tennis at my home only a few times. She was a strikingly beautiful girl, whose photo appeared from time to time on the social pages of  newspapers and magazines. I'd felt flattered rather than patronized when she accepted the invitation to play tennis at my place. The other half of the couple was a married man whose wife was near delivery of their first baby, was there for the first and as it turned out, only time. He was invited by one of my friends, to get him out of the house while his wife and her sisters got a nursery ready for the baby. At the end of the day's tennis when dusk descended the rest of us moved inside for refreshments, but these two stayed on the veranda deep in conversation. My Auntie Doris was in bed a few feet away through the open window and heard every word which she relayed to my mother who passed on a few choice bits to me, including "My underwear is in the way; I'll take it off."  It was the start of a scandalous affair. A gossip-mongering friend of my mother reported a sighting in a hotel in the Adelaide Hills where they had evidently stayed together overnight. Several weeks later she unexpectedly dropped out of sight, went interstate and did not appear again in Adelaide for many months. The rumour mills worked overtime: she had gone to Sydney to have an abortion; to Melbourne to have a baby that was immediately put up for adoption. When she reappeared she did not rejoin the social set in which previously she had been prominent.  A few years later when we were both working in London I took her out a few times. I tried to ask about her abrupt departure and prolonged absence from Adelaide but she deftly deflected my questions. As for him, his marriage broke up; he has been an air force pilot during the war and returned to flying as a pilot for a rather shady company that carried freight between Australia and the Pacific islands. Not for long, however. He was caught smuggling drugs into Australia and sentenced to a long stay in prison. I was reminded of this sad story by seeing her in one of the tennis party photos in my previous post.