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Mrs Beatrice DuMont Muller perches regally on a brocade banquette of the Queen Elizabeth 2, enjoying her sudden celebrity as "the lady who lives on the ship". Slim, well-manicured hands that will never work again are folded on her silk-clad lap on this, the 1,050th day of the rest of her floating life.
While the other passengers come and go on their transatlantic voyages and world cruises, Mrs Muller intends to sail on into the sunset until she gets bored with being pampered or dies. Neither prospect seems imminent.
Honey-blonde and sharp as a razor, the 82-year-old widow sweeps down the ship's corridors and stairs as if she owns the place. She sets a sprightly pace, but apologises for not being quite at the top of her form - she pulled a tendon while doing the samba after a formal dinner.
"Oh, I love dancing. Some nights, I dance for two hours," she says. "We have gentleman hosts. They have to be about 50, single, know all the dances and be of good reputation. They must dance at the woman's level and not show off. It's a very satisfactory arrangement for single people. Many women would never come on a world cruise if they didn't have dance partners. You don't come on a ship to pick up men. That would be a very dull thing."
Sadly, Beatrice Muller lost her lifelong dance partner, her husband Robert, when the QE2 was slipping out of Bombay on a world cruise in March 1999. He had suffered from emphysema and the ship's doctor had saved his life on two earlier occasions, but this time no more could be done except, as she gratefully acknowledges, to make his last 30 hours "quite special".
Since 1995, the Mullers had been regularly forsaking their three homes in America for the joys of cruising on the QE2. They loved it so much that Robert Muller, a former chemical engineer, proposed spending the whole of 2000 on board. Although he didn't make it, the couple's two sons,...