That William Empson should be there was, perhaps, less surprising than his demeanour, which was courtly yet randy, frayed but impressive. He sat in the dugout held fast in the earth’s shivery embrace, his hands fidgeting with pen, paper, cigarette, small fetish items – a signet ring, a netsuke.

He wore wire-framed spectacles that I thought I recalled from old photographs – but I could’ve been wrong about this, and besides that that there should be a certain penumbra of ambiguity surrounding him seemed only fitting. Fitting it was too that he wrote and thought and smoked and wrote again. Ken Morse supplying the rostrum camera, my eyes tracked across the floor of the dugout, which was covered with six inches of pellucid water. Down there on the impacted mud floor lay a Stylophone, an iPhone, and old Bakelite phone with the rows of buttons needed for a switchboard – all of them were clearly in working order. My youngest daughter was there as well; aged nine, painfully beautiful – I cried upon looking at her beauty. Beauty and fear.

Up they come the man and the boys – up they come. Up they come, the man and the boys – stepping lightly, the cuffs of their trousers flicking at bracken and thistles: twill against barbs and fronds. No contest.

Up they come, the man clearly the father, his sandy hair and carefully arranged features would in themselves indicate a certain sureness – in class, its privileges, in breeding – but this is compounded by the boys: versions of himself at 10 and 14, the unformed versions of his face only serving to emphasise how complete and well-made he is. And besides, they move as one – as dancers do in chorus; they move as one and retrievers frolic around their gaiters; they move as one and then there are the guns: a big double bore 12-gauge for daddy, a smaller shotgun for the adolescent, a tiny scaled-down one for the child. They carry the guns as props – broken over their feed arms. Such a congruence of limb and stock and barrel, such a harmony of purposeful acculturation – there should be a Stubbs on hand to paint them, and a Landseer nearby to do the same for whatever it is they might kill. Instead there’s only me with my two younger sons – me watching and paralysed with envy. We had been proud, that morning, putting on our own tweed jackets, buckling on our own gaiters – we had thought ourselves the finest of figs, altogether comme il faut – but now looking upon this spiffing trio, their tweed jackets patently bespoke, the pockets, collars and revettes faced with soft brown leather, we’re exposed for the middle-class cheapies we truly are – and so this strange coincidence of men and boys and dogs and tweed on the morning moor goes unremarked – for we stay silent, cowering in the bracken, knowing our place as they go by, heads held high.

The matter of my relationship with Max’s widow has to be addressed, so, although I have never met her I arrange to spend a couple of months in the Central European town where I know she lives.

It is a cold and fusty place: a network of dirty snow-choked alleys and partitioned rooms in which oil stoves distort and dirty the atmosphere of ersatz coffee, useless sedition and antisemitism poorly understood by those who espouse it – as they’ve never met a Jew. I do not reveal myself, when we meet, as a devotee of Max’s writings who has obsessively read and reread his works to the point where their otherworldly cadences have suborned my own feebler rhythms. She is younger and thinner than I imagined – all brown bangs, bitten nails, thick glasses in cheap plastic frames. When, after mutually disappointing lovemaking, I reveal myself – we are squabbling over rights to the thin candlewick bedspread – she asks only this: that I do not profane Max’s memory. And so I won’t.

The Buckminster Fuller reverie needs must be recounted – it is so full of the sweetness of life, an ineffable sweetness compounded from lost love of all fathers, brothers, kind paternalists who might once have sheltered me from the truth: life breaks off your penis at the haft.

My oldest brother – not the eldest – and I go to see Buckminster Fuller who’s living in a house that synthesises Arts and Crafts with Frank Lloyd Wright: wide eaves, a series of grassy terraces declining to an overgrown sunken garden and a copse of silver birches. We have my youngest son with us, and while we go to talk with Fuller, he goes to play in the open air. I wish I could go with him – Fuller is welcoming enough and offers us sherry or tea, as we please, but his study-cum-drawing room is dusty in the afternoon sunlight, with piles of old papers on every available surface and a great number of dusty pot plants here and there on ugly japonicas or else mouldering the surfaces of Melamine phonograph cabinets. Why are we there? It’s unclear, but I think has something to do with family: with the interest so many of us – males at least – take in the built environment. Fuller talks to us about those of his predictions that – in his estimation – were right and those that were wrong. When I go to find the child in the garden, the birdsong is explosively loud, while the small white space shuttle arcs across the high blue sky and I … cry.

Impressed by this young man, the author of a book critiquing the demonisation of the British working class, I follow him into the gothic revival church on the Gloucester Road. I used to live in this area! I call after him – but he cannot hear me.

The interior of the church has been partitioned off with plywood into a series of exhibition areas that are connected by narrow walkways and crawlspaces. I try to reach the young man – who I find attractive – but there is a crowd of Japanese tourists coming in the other direction: young women in plaid skirts, white blouses and with Hello Kitty satchels slung about their narrow shoulders. I have to crush myself against the partition so that they can squeeze past me. Finally I reach the space that approximates to the altar, but there’s no sign of the young man, only a mound of cattle dung, a botheration of flies, some torn up physics textbooks. From the direction of the Cromwell Road there comes the snarling retort of a motorcycle engine.

A former candidate for the Tory leadership and I bare-knuckle box beside the Watts Towers in LA. His profile – plump, sweaty, vinous – looks absurd against the spiralling ironwork, but he punches hard, and the crowd gasps as he lands blow after blow on me. We clinch, and the clinch becomes an embrace – we are having sex under a floral-patterned duvet, downtown in the garment district. He cracks a popper under my nose and everything goes blue and then black.

At the Scots service station there’s a Korean restaurant serving pickles and strips of grilled beef – also a large bookstore reminiscent of Powell’s in Portland, Oregon: long, high shafts stratified with a great lode of books, and a pervasive smell of fresh paper and ink.

The family go off to find the toilets and I walk the dog along the grassy berm beside the petrol station. He throws himself on his back on the grass and wriggles. I kneel down and pin him by his paws, he says: Will we be staying the night here? And I realise that although he has always talked, until now I’ve been unprepared to acknowledge it. My wonderment is at my own denial – not the dog’s speech, but while I am lost in this emotion – which feels exalted, aerial, multicoloured – the dog slips his lead and runs away between the cars and scampers across the road. Frantic to find him, I tramp through the gardens of suburban houses, cucumber frames and raspberry canes snapping and cracking beneath my feet. I find the dog in a greenhouse; he has become a small Korean woman wearing a cheap black nylon suit and a white nylon blouse. He cowers and speaks to me… unintelligibly.

The cars are parked behind a corrugated iron fence – an old humped Saab, a broad and finned Ford Zephyr estate, and a Citroën DS. The DS is mine – or at least I have the use of it. I certainly used to have a car like this. The fence surrounds a muddy islet, its ragged edge bridging small embayments against which the still muddier waters of the lagoon lap.

Every time I touch the DS it quivers and slips sideways on the mud – leaning through the driver window, I accidentally knock the dash-mounted gear lever, and the large, black, flopping body of the car slithers across the surface, dragging me with it. The car slowly and sleekly insinuates itself under the fence and we are wallowing in the lagoon, the DS and I. Friends arrive back from some juke-joint, the sounds of zydeco floating in their perfumed hair as the process, silhouetted along the bayou by the setting sun. They carry jam jars full of fireflies tied to sticks – they are happy. They stop to point and laugh at me, as I slop about hopelessly with the car – I try to make the best of it, climbing on to the bonnet to take a bow, sliding off with a splash, while trying to make it look … intentional.

I happen to be there for the death of S – we argued once, and I have never forgotten or forgiven. He had grown monstrously fat while moribund, and now dollops of his corpse protrude from the windows of the squat, quaint old house. The undertakers, the family, ambulance and fire crews all stand around scratching their heads – what is to be done? The house will need to be dismantled to get him out. I feel my own mind to be beautifully organised – all my thoughts and feelings about S are perfectly arrayed, I’ve only to sit down on a ledge and write out his obituary. The newspaper print it in facsimile – in the original Biro.