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the shower but by the time I had plunged the cafetière and was warming my croissant in the oven I felt almost normal, except that the early light had such a quality that I opened the back door simply so I could look at it. It lent a certain beauty even to the straggly herb garden that was giving room to herbs and weeds in democratic measure. I piled my croissant high with rose petal conserve – I had brought half a suitcase of it back with me from Greece – drained the cafetière and drove into town.
    Not only had
Time Lines
managed to borrow the Roman Baths for a few hours, they had also wrangled reserved parking for their vehicles at the end of York Street for the morning. There were vans and cars and a Land Cruiser in the green and gold
Time Lines
livery. I stuck my car at the end of the line.
    It was very quiet here in the centre of town – perfect for filming, I supposed – and the warm early light playing on the sandstone buildings was in itself nearly compensation for the early start.
    Six-thirty exactly. The doors to the baths were closed. In answer to my knocking, a sleepy and monosyllabic employee opened up for me and pointed the way past the silent tills and racks of audio guides. As I turned right and started down the stairs I could smell the warm sulphurous air that had pervaded this place since the beginning of time. Even though I hadn’t been here for years I still remembered it well, the smell and the museum layout. Not that it was possible to get lost in the museum. It had been designed as a one-way walk-through for funnelling hordes of visitors past the exhibits, down to the baths and out through the gift shop. I took my time, revelling in luxurious, tourist-free quietude.
    All the lights and displays had been turned on for the benefit of the TV crew, giving the empty museum an eerie, abandoned air. Here and there life-sized film projections of actors in period costume, sitting, standing and chatting silently, added to the ghostly feel of the empty rooms. As I progressed I could hear voices – English, not Roman. I found the first of the TV crew by the overflow of the Sacred Spring, just inside the museum building. A camera on a tripod was pointing at the ancient stonework of the arched culvert from which hot water gushed into an equally ancient drain. Minerals in the water had stained the stonework bright orange and the scene was atmospherically lit from below. A sad-eyed, middle-aged sound recordist with headphones clamped to his ears kept shaking his bald head at the man behind the camera.
    The camera operator, a man in his thirties with a sharp nose, dark hair and long sideburns looked up. ‘Are you . . .?’
    â€˜Chris,’ I confirmed.
    â€˜Hi, I’m Paul. Guy with you?’
    â€˜I was supposed to meet him here.’
    â€˜We all are. OK, erm, we need some quiet for this now. Emms is outside, through that door.’
    â€˜OK. Emms?’
    â€˜Mags Morrison. The director. Red hair, lots of it, can’t miss her.’
    I stepped through the door, shedding two millennia in the process. The green waters of the Great Bath steamed gently in the cooler morning air. Surrounded by a colonnaded archway paved with uneven flagstones worn smooth by a million feet, the rectangle of the bath itself was open to the sky and watched over by life-sized stone figures. This didn’t need projections to transport me back in time; it was doing fine on its own. Then I heard voices and spotted the twenty-first century encamped in a dark doorway. Camera, sound equipment, monitors, cables, people with clipboards, thick files and several laptops.
    As promised by Paul the cameraman there was a woman with henna-red hair. Dressed in sweater, jeans and walking boots she had her hair drawn back into a long ponytail clasped by a black plastic butterfly grip. Behind her I saw Cy crouching in the shadows in front of a laptop. They had set up shop at the west end of the