I was led past the open doorway of a gleaming white modern kitchen, out onto a wide whitewashed porch where rattan furniture, potted palms and more cut lilies looked out on the slope of a landscaped backyard that fell to a white beach and blue sea.

Miss Bristol paused on the porch to bestow one of her frequent, but no less prized, smiles upon me. “Time you meet Sir Harry,” she said. “Leave your bag up here on the porch….”

Down wide steps off one side of the porch she took me, and I heard a chugging, whirring, that was not the tide rolling in.

“That’s Sir Harry now,” she said, and she wasn’t smiling but her mahogany eyes had a twinkle. “He’s playin’ with his favorite toy, you know?”

I didn’t know, but I soon did. A palm tree that was between me and the ocean suddenly toppled like a twig.

I hadn’t noticed the heavy chain around the base of the tree, which had been literally uprooted by a weathered red tractor, its wheels casually churning across the golf-course-like grass, pulling along the palm and its roots and random clinging clods of dirt, like a horse dragging its fallen rider.

Only the tractor’s rider, or rather driver, had not fallen; he grabbed the gearshift knob, threw the tractor into a thrumming neutral and hopped off like a frog. Clad in slouch hat, red-and-black lumberjack shirt, khaki jodhpurs and knee boots, he was a small but powerful-looking man with a powerful-looking paunch, which he scratched as he walked toward me.

“Goddamn trees!” he said, working an already harsh, grating voice above the mechanical rumble of the tractor. “What the hell is the use of having an ocean in your backyard if you can’t see the fucking thing?”

My first thought was whether his salty language had offended Miss Bristol, but when I went to glance at her she was gone. Then I caught sight of her, already halfway up the lawn, heading toward the house.