She fumbled around in her handbag and produced a pair of small white gloves, pulling them on before bending over and tearing up a couple of sprigs of hemlock, wrapping them carefully inside a clean hanky.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Picking some. If it gets too much I can boil this up in water and knock it back, can’t I?’

I wandered on behind her as she took sly cuttings of all the most poisonous plants in the garden, all of them bearing yellow ‘No tocar!’ warning signs and each one with several more exclamation marks than the last.

‘You won’t be allowed to take them back on the ship,’ I told her. ‘How are you going to get them through security?’

‘I’m an old, disabled woman. Officials tend to rush me through because I hold everybody up. Carry on, I say. Use their own prejudices against them.’

I got that. And I’ll admit it was useful having Caro in a wheelchair. People gave us the best tables, pushed us to the front and generally ignored us wherever we went. But I still didn’t like her taking the plants.

‘Ooh look at these.’ We came upon a small tree whose beautiful trumpet-like flowers drooped towards the ground like they were bowing. ‘Los trompetas de angel – Angel’s trumpets,’ she announced.

‘Pretty,’ I said.

‘Pretty lethal,’ she chuckled. ‘These are the most dangerous flowers here. A botanist did a talk a few months back on the ship – they contain some terrible toxins, like atropine. They look beautiful but they’re killers.’

Kind of like me, I thought.

‘We should take a few,’ said Caro, reaching out to the blooms.

‘Are you insane?’

She plucked some of the flowers and wrapped them in a hanky.

‘No,’ I said, standing my ground. ‘Put them back. Put it all back.’

‘What?’ she said, turning round to face me.

‘I don’t want you to take any of it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to die.’

She removed her gloves and tossed them in a litter bin. ‘It’s not something you have any control over. Every day I become frailer, more scared. What have I got to live for? Sitting in a wing-back chair, pissing myself to Judge Rinder? You have your life ahead of you.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Of course you do, silly girl.’

‘I don’t have anything. Or anyone.’

‘That’s silly talk—’

‘—why can’t you live as much as you can for now? Then go home and die there?’ I bubbled with rage.

‘Because my home is the ship.’

‘Your home should be on Capri. With Beatrice.’

‘Capri is in the past.’

‘The past can hurt, but you can either run from it or learn from it.’

‘Is that Rousseau?’

‘No, it’s the baboon from The Lion King. But he’s right, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. And your baboon knows what he’s talking about,’ she laughed.