Go with the flow

Bea Muller has spent most of her adult life around boats. Over many summers, she, her chemical engineer husband, Robert, and their two sons would head off from their New Jersey home to either the coast of Maine or South Carolina to mess about on the ocean or just sit watching the sea from their terrace. When Robert retired in 1995, they would give over at least half of each year to travelling the globe on cruise liners. Their favourite jaunt was the four-month world tour aboard the QE2. They were doing that for the fourth time when, in March 1999, off the coast of India, Robert died on the Cunard flagship.

"He'd smoked three packets of cigarettes a day for 50 years, so he really couldn't have any complaints," says 83-year-old Bea, matter-of-factly, "and for me it was such a beautiful death. We were where we loved to be. He even had the captain at his bedside. When I finally got home to the States and read the papers he had left behind, I realised that he knew how near to death he was and that he had planned that it would happen in precisely the way that it did."

Back in the small town of Bound Brook, in the house where she had raised her children, just three miles from the equally small town of Summerville where she herself had grown up at the height of the Depression, Bea faced up to being on her own after 57 years of marriage. Her sons were busy with their own lives. There were no grandchildren to fuss over. Her eyesight was failing, further isolating her, and anyway most of her local friends had moved to the sunnier climes of Florida. It is a familiar enough scenario in old age, but Bea's solution was unique. She opted for a small town that moved around the world, somewhere, she believes, where the spirit of Robert is never far away. She put her home on the market, sold everything – "even my treasures" – rang Cunard and booked herself on the QE2 – permanently.

She's been living in cabin 4068 on Four deck for three years now and is paid up to the end of 2003. "I keep nagging them to confirm the sailing programme so I can sort out what happens beyond then," she says. At around £3,500 a month for board and lodgings, it isn't cheap, but if you book ahead, she advises, you can get a good discount that compares favourably with any plush old folk's home.

We're sitting having a cup of Earl Grey in the Chart Room bar of the QE2. It used to be for first-class passengers only and is more stately than some of the alternatives. Her 10ft by 10ft "inside" (without a porthole) cabin is too small for entertaining, or swinging the ship's cat, she explains. "Anyway," she adds, "I'm old-fashioned about gentleman callers."

There is undeniably a twinkle in her eye. She has, she tells me merrily, as the waist-coated waitress lays out the tea, "left my old life behind and started a new life here. Some people think I'm nuts, but I just think I'm lucky." She says it with the zeal of the recent convert and that homespun sincerity peculiar to Americans. "I'm living a fairy-tale. I think of the younger crew members as my grandchildren. I live in a palace and they spoil me." Playing Queen Bea does more than suit her, she says. "I'm convinced it has kept me alive."

At a time when our ever-older population laps up the Prozac and complains about the lack of access to vital services, Bea seems to have it made. If she wants a doctor, he can be in her cabin in two minutes. There's a well-equipped hospital ward on board and she pays her insurance so she can be airlifted in an emergency. She keeps in contact with family and old friends by e-mail – "I could ring but it's $12.50 a minute and I want to make my money last so that I can die here."

Her children visit once a year, when they come aboard for a cruise. Even if she were keeping the home fires burning, she doesn't think she'd see any more of them. Moreover, there's an ever-changing horizon, a new influx of company every few weeks, three meals a day, bridge on demand in the Crystal Bar and even young stewards in the Grand Lounge whose job – yes, job, she emphasises – it is to dance with unaccompanied lady passengers.

As she sips her tea and giggles about these gyrating gigolos, Mrs Muller, as the crew call her, reveals that her previous life wasn't quite so conventional as it at first appears.

In the late 1960s, with her children growing up, she decamped to India, where she worked with the Persian-born philosopher and guru to the rich and famous, Meher Baba. "Your Peter Townshend of The Who was one of his followers," she informs me. "Some friends were going out to Poona to make a film about him and they had a free seat, so I went. Robert was busy, so he was fine about it. It took about two years on and off and then, after Baba's death in 1971, I started organising his archive. That took about another decade. He was, for me, a Christ-like man."

It's not hard to imagine how such sentiments would have gone down in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Mrs Muller would have had a reputation for eccentricity long before she packed one small bag and ran away to sea. Then there was her devotion to the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin, and to Georgei Gurdjieff and his disciple, Peter Ouspensky, fashionable alternative thinkers in the 1950s. Amid the formal dinners, frenetic activity and ostentation of the QE2, here then is a woman with a profound interior life, who has long been in search of something. Has she found it? Is this her floating monastery? She laughs: if only it were that easy.

"On the world cruises, we have an Anglican chaplain on board. I don't know if that counts for anything," she says.

Bea clearly doesn't give a jot what anyone thinks of her. Indeed, she appears to enjoy her status as one of the stranger sights on the venerable cruise liner. As if to emphasise the point, as we sit talking, one of the crew comes past with a party of passengers on the daily heritage trail. Mrs Muller is pointed out and described as if she were one of the sacred maritime relics in display cases in the lounges and lobbies. She plays her part with a regal wave, then spoils it by wisecracking that she is busy having fun with a young man, and turns back to me to reveal, in a stage whisper, that Warren, the guide, is "the best dancer on board". She evidently likes her earthly pleasures as much as her spiritual highs.

Doesn't she ever get lonely? "With 1,500 new people coming on board all the time?' she barks back. "But to them you're a curiosity, and you can get lonely in a crowd." There is, she says piping down a little, some truth in that. "With the transatlantic crossings people are only here for six days, so I don't tend to reach out so much anymore. I've no sooner done it than they're having their last-night Baked Alaska and getting off. With the world cruises, though, there is a hardcore of about 200 people who come back time and again. "We're all friends," she says.

It is from this group that she fills her address book with places to stay when the QE2 is in dry dock or chartered. She is determined not to go back to her past, and has little curiosity about it. But there must, I keep badgering, be moments of loneliness? "There are moments when I want to shout, but the doctor is very good. He puts up with my carrying on and anyway, my life is just too full for worrying. I'm writing my memoirs of life aboard and then I want to write about Meher Baba. I've got a literary agent getting on to see me next time we're in New York."

If in the past there was something extra-ordinary but hidden about Bea Muller, then she has belatedly found a way of bringing it into the open. For many, I suspect, her current life would be less a fairy-tale than a nightmare – the endless dressing-up for dinner, the vulgarity of some of her bloated fellow passengers, and the rigid class-system that still pertains aboard could all grate. But Bea Muller is one part entranced by and one part removed from her milieu and so, in her own odd way, has found a kind of peace and contentment.

Later, I see her wandering through the crowded casino, incongruous in her pink straw hat and white pumps, watching all that is going on, her set-smile giving away nothing. At first I take it for her equivalent of a royal walkabout, but the more I look – and this may have been the result of the constant roll of the boat – I could swear she is floating above the throngs of besequinned matrons and tuxedo-clad men like some sort of maritime guardian angel. *

For information about cruises on the QE2, visit www.cunard.co.uk, or call 0800 052 3840