27 September 1938

27 September 1938 is the opening date of the novel’s first day and the point at which its political crisis is brought into focus through Hugh Legat’s reading. Shortly before one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, Legat sits at The Ritz, London, with the previous night’s speech by Adolf Hitler before him for the third time.

The Afternoon in London

The scene fixes the date with unusual precision: it is Tuesday, 27 September 1938, shortly before one in the afternoon. Legat, identified as a member of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, is shown to a table beside one of the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling windows. He orders a half-bottle of 1921 Dom Perignon that he cannot afford, then folds his copy of The Times to page seventeen.

These details give the day both an official and a personal frame. The date belongs to the unfolding diplomatic crisis, while the newspaper, the unaffordable wine, and Legat’s chosen seat locate him in a particular moment of private attention. The narration begins not with a conference or public address but with a diplomat returning to a text he has already read twice.

Reading the Previous Night’s Speech

The speech Legat studies was delivered the night before in Berlin’s Sportpalast by Adolf Hitler. By reading it for a third time, Legat makes the gap between the speech’s public occasion and its London reception part of the scene: an address delivered in Berlin is now being scrutinized by a British diplomat at his restaurant table.

The opening’s sequence also distinguishes clock time from the time of attention. The date and hour establish the present afternoon; the speech reaches back to the previous night, and Legat’s repeated reading gives the past event an immediate presence. The chapter’s designation, “DAY ONE,” marks 27 September as the start of the narrative’s counted crisis, while the text on page seventeen becomes the object through which that crisis first enters Legat’s day.