‘Thank you,’ Tommy said, nodding in acknowledgement of the bow and almost giving the words a crisp British accent.
Scootie preceded them through the doorway. Mummingford led the dog aside, dropped to one knee, and began to dry the mutt and blot its paws with the beach towel.
As Del closed the door, Tommy said, ‘I’m afraid we’re as soaked as Scootie. We’re going to make a mess.’
‘Alas, you are,’ said Mummingford dryly. ‘But I must tolerate Miss Payne to an extent I’m not obliged to tolerate the dog. And her friends enjoy sufferance as well.’
‘Where’s Mom?’ Del asked.
‘She awaits you in the music room, Miss Payne. I’ll send his nibs along to join you as soon as he’s presentably dry.’
Scootie grinned out of a cowl of white cotton, enjoying his rubdown.
‘We can’t stay long,’ Del told the butler. ‘We’re on the lam from a doll snake rat-quick monster thing. But could we please have coffee and a tray of breakfast pastries?’
‘In a trice, Miss Payne.’
‘You’re a dear, Mummingford.’
‘It’s the cross I bear,’ said Mummingford.
The grand hail, at least a hundred feet long, was floored with highly polished black granite on which their wet rubber-soled shoes squeaked with each step. The white walls were hung with enormous unframed canvases: all abstract art full of motion and colour, each piece illuminated precisely to the edges of the canvas by projector lamps in the ceiling, so it seemed as if the art glowed from within. The ceiling was panelled with bands of polished steel alternating with bands of brushed steel. A double cove provided indirect lighting above, and additional indirect lighting flooded out at floor level from a groove in the black-granite baseboard.
Sensing Tommy’s amazement, Del said, ‘Mom built the outside of the house to please the community architectural committee, but inside it’s as modem as a spaceship and as Mediterranean as Coca Cola.’
The music room was two-thirds of the way along the main hall, on the left. A black-lacquered door opened onto a room floored with polished white limestone speck-led with gracefully curved marine fossils. The sound-baffled ceiling and walls were padded and then upholstered in charcoal-grey fabric, as if this were a recording studio, and indirect lighting was tucked behind the baffles.
The chamber was huge, approximately forty by sixty feet. In the centre was a twenty-by-thirty custom carpet with a geometric pattern in half a dozen subtly different shades of taupe and gold. In the centre of the carpet were a black leather sofa and four black leather armchairs arranged in a conversational grouping around a solid rectangular-block coffee table veneered with a parquetry of faux-ivory squares.
Although a hundred music lovers could have been seated in the room for a piano recital no piano was provided. The music – Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’ -didn’t issue from a state-of-the-art entertainment system with. surround-sound speakers, either. It came, instead, from what appeared to be a small, table-model, Art Deco radio that stood in the centre of the faux-ivory coffee table, in a cone of light from a tightly focused halogen lamp in the ceiling. The tinny and static-spotted quality of the sound suggested that the radio was actually a cassette or CD player loaded with one of those authentic as-recorded-live-on-dance-night-in-the-forties radio programs.
Del’s mother sat in one of the chairs, eyes closed, smiling as beatifically as Saint Francis in the limestone carvings around the front door, swaying her head from side to side with the music, keeping time by patting her hands against the arms of the chair. Although only fifty, she looked at least ten years younger: quite a striking woman, not blond like Del but olive-skinned with jet-black hair, delicate features, and a swanlike neck. She reminded Tommy of the elfin actress in that old movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s …Audrey Hepburn.
When Del lowered the volume on the radio, Mrs. Payne opened her eyes. They were as blue as Del’s and even deeper. Her smile widened. ‘Good heavens, dear, you look like a drowned rat.’ She rose from the chair and regarded Tommy. ‘And so do you, young man.’
Tommy was surprised to see that Mrs. Payne was wearing an ao dais, a flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensemble similar to those that his own mother wore at times.