Lemongate

As someone once said, Better to keep silent and to be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. I had doubts about telling you this story, but it wouldn’t be right to have the privilege of reaching you and all my other lovely readers if I am going to fall at the first hurdle, simply because I do not come off well in my account of an event. It’s a story in which I am the bad guy. But in thinking over what happened, I learned something about myself – and about human nature perhaps – and it might even be a truth to share. I hope it is enlightening: it certainly has been to me.

Picture the scene. Mallorca, on the northwest coast. I am celebrating my 27th wedding anniversary with my husband Marcel. We have been here nearly 36 hours and so far it’s been simply lovely. Today, we have survived a hair-raising bus trip over the mountain and are in a tiny mountain village, close to the coast. We know there’s a beach not too far away, but we have a long walk to descend to get there. Never mind! It’s hot, but we are feeling good. We have hats, and money to buy water, and comfortable shoes, and there are a few fountains and rills along the path in which I can keep wetting my scarf to stay cool.

We start down a metalled road. We don’t pass a soul, but there are a few houses. We wonder if we’re on the right track because we haven’t passed anyone. But the sea is always at the bottom of steep roads so we are confident. After some ten minutes of walking, we stop along the way and sit on a stone bench, in the shade of a flowering shrub. We share a custard pastry Marcel has bought along with the bottle of water, and we gaze through a curtain of deep magenta flowers that fringe the shade. Refreshed and happy to be alive, and happy to be still happily married after all our ups and downs, we resume our walk. After a while the road becomes a rocky path. On one side are some trees. Someone suggests picking a lemon: I genuinely can’t remember which of us. Hang on, I do – it is Marcel, because he says we can add it to our bottle of water, and I wouldn’t have thought of that, since I like water just as it is. The lemons are all out of reach. I say that there are some lemons on the ground. Most are rotten but there is a perfect one close to the edge of the fence. Marcel says he can’t reach it, but I say, cleverly, that our umbrella has a pointy end and we can spear it.

It works. We are gleeful – think Rumpelstiltskin when he realises no one has guessed his name and he’s going to claim the hand of the princess the next day – and we turn back to the path with the lemon on the end of the pole.

Suddenly, there’s a woman on the path not six inches from us. I am startled, but she has already started speaking, loudly and clearly.

“I suppose you think it’s funny to help yourself to people’s lemons!” she says.

“Ha ha!” I say, thinking she’s joking and jovial. She very much is not.

“Those lemons belong to my NEIGHBOURS. They don’t belong to you!”

She is a Brit, about 30, slim and dark haired and very angry. She is in a black swimsuit with a sarong on top, and a beach bag over her shoulder. She’s walking up the path, probably on her way back after a swim. She is now a few feet past me. Oh, but I am fast with my clever retort.

“It was on the GROUND!” I shout after her. “It was half rotten!” (It was perfect.)

“Doesn’t matter! It doesn’t belong to you!” she bellows and continues on her way.

Marcel and I resume our descent, and we are quiet.
“Silly cow,” I say.

“Ro, she is right. We shouldn’t have taken the lemon,” Marcel says.

“But she didn’t have to be such a COW about it,” I say. “Brits!”

This is stupid because my husband is a Brit and we are no strangers to fighting, and everything has been going well on this holiday so far, and it’s risky. For some reason Marcel doesn’t push back.

We change the subject. We get to the beach. We decide we may as well go ahead and squeeze the lemon into the bottle of water, since we have it now, and it has a giant hole in it. The water is nice, lemony, but then I decide we had better appreciate the entire thing so as not to let it go to waste, as that would compound the sin. I eat it: it is like no lemon I have ever tasted, sweet and full of flavour.

After an hour on the beach, I am still feeling really, really uncomfortable.

“Marcel, that Brit really wrecked my buzz,” I say, expecting him to be annoyed with the term (he is very volatile for a Brit, a result of his French-Mauritian / Austrian parentage).

“Me too,” says Marcel. “The only thing that would make her in the right is if they were her friends.”

“They were,” I say, “she said they were her neighbours.”

“Damn,” says Marcel. “But…it was theft. There is no getting away from it. We stole it and we shouldn’t have.”

“No, she was a silly cow,” I say, “going around ruining people’s day.”

As we leave the beach, we stop so Marcel can get out of his togs and into dry clothes. Three German women (see sketch below) are a little ahead of us. One stops where the beach becomes road, where a thin, bronzed and white-bearded man is selling his wares: the beach end of the stall is a lemon stand. The German on the far left of my sketch orders two glasses of freshly-squeezed lemon juice. The lemon-seller, smiling and zen-like, puts brown sugar, ice and mint leaves into the shaker, and pours out two paper cups. I decide to order some too, and he prepares it for me, smiling gently the whole time. Afterwards I tell myself that I have balanced the theft with trade, but then I remember I wouldn’t have bought it except that Marcel stopped to dress, and I saw the German lady. (A queue for lemonade forms when other people leaving the beach see us waiting for ours, and the stall had no customers before that, so it turns out I am a very good person indeed, even though the German lady gave me the idea.)

We take a different path back: it’s faster but extremely steep, and I almost faint three times in the sizzling 35º heat. I might have done were it not for the delicious sweet lemonade.

Later, back in our hotel room, Marcel says he really should launder the lemon, by adding it to the rest of the bottle of water. I make sure to drink every drop, even the next day when the water isn’t as fresh, as I cannot add the sin of waste to that of theft. Such a saint!

Marcel has accepted we are thieves, and casually says once or twice that I was supposed to be the lookout. I have no memory of being assigned that role.

By the next day, Marcel has characteristically forgotten all about it, and I, equally characteristically, can’t leave it alone. I find myself becoming aware that I am tying myself in knots to make this English woman the bad guy, rather than me. I tell myself that she wouldn’t have challenged us if we had been two men (yes she would, Brits are fearless); I think of all the things I could have said, like “haven’t you ever picked up fruit fallen from a tree” and other such snappy retorts; I call her the lemon farmer’s little WatchBrit, again, fully expecting Marcel to run out of patience at my Britain-themed slurs. I still have no idea why all of my childish name-calling didn’t kick off a row. If the woman had been Irish (not possible) and he had called her a WatchPaddy I would have been mortally offended. But in Ireland we say nothing. We think a lot of things, but we say nothing.

(As we prepare to leave two days later, the beautiful proprietor of our hotel invites us to help ourselves to a lemon from a box on the doorstep of the hotel. Marcel christens it the licit lemon – as opposed to the illicit lemon, of course.)

In the taxi to the airport, I realise I am still struggling to be in the bold corner, and I find myself googling:

is it theft if you pick up fallen fruit

Depends on the state, is the answer: in California it’s this and in Florida it’s that – of course, Google assumes you’re in the US. It also says there’s a difference whether the tree in question is in your property or theirs. So I type:

what if you reach in to get the fallen fruit

…but Google still isn’t getting the full picture, so I type

what if you don’t actually set foot on someone’s land, but poke a pointed thing through a hole in the fence to get the fruit, and your hand is only hovering over the land

and this time the answer is quite clear: it’s theft. This does not feel good at all.

And suddenly it hits me. Humans (other than Marcel, clearly) struggle with being in the wrong. Or I do, more accurately. All these years I have scoffed inwardly – and outwardly, if I think I am among allies – at people who volunteer that their pet dog, cat or horse was not bought but is a Rescue. They don’t have a dog, they have a rescuedog. They don’t have three cats, they have three rescuecats. Sometimes they don’t even know what type of animal it is, it’s just a Rescue. I even drew a cartoon about it once which I think was very funny.

And now the tables are turned. I am officially a virtue-signaller, and it’s much worse because it’s within my very heart, I don’t even try to convince others.

What did the great physicist Richard Feynman say? The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. He said we are fundamentally wired for self-deception.

But what do I actually DO with this knowledge? I guess just be aware that I am very capable of self-deception and thinking I am a Good Person, and that I am a thief, and a sly one at that…

…because I didn’t tell you that before we saw the lemon on the ground, before the little WatchBrit jumped out from behind a bush, Marcel (without any demurring from me) picked a lime straight from the tree.

And no one has given the lime a second thought.