The Marriages — Plate III

The card index of marriages was found in 2015 by the present Keeper of the Archive, who is also the seventh card in it. It had not been hidden. It was filed exactly where it should have been, in the sixth of his 341 indexes, in a drawer he had been opening in front of her for four years, and it was labelled — in the same hand, the same ink and the same unhurried capitals as everything else — MARRIAGES, 1957–. SEVEN ENTRIES. SEE ALSO: CARD 0.

Her first act was to write to the five surviving former wives and ask whether the index should be destroyed. All five replied that it absolutely should not. Four asked whether they might add something to their own card. The Estate publishes the cards here with those additions, in the order he filed them, which is chronological, because he could not have filed them any other way.

The one rule in the whole plate

Figgy McWigglesworth III has never proposed marriage to anyone. Not once, in seven marriages across sixty-nine years. Every one of the seven was proposed to him, and he accepted every one for the same reason he bought sixty-one ships he has never boarded and a cheese he did not want: declining would have required him to explain himself, and explaining himself takes time he would rather spend sorting.

This is not, the record is clear, a man being pursued for money. The first two proposals arrived before he had any, and the Tarapacá business did not surface until the fourth marriage was already over. It is a man so completely absorbed in a drawer that a remarkable number of people have found him restful to be near — and a smaller but significant number have found, after four or five years, that they had married a filing cabinet with excellent manners.

I have never been left for another man. I have, on six occasions, been left for the reasonable expectation of being spoken to at breakfast. — To Paris Match, 1999

The index, as filed

The six fields are his button fields, unaltered. He has never seen anything strange in this, and when his fourth wife put it to him directly in 1984 he replied that they were the only fields he had, that they had served for thirty years, and that inventing a second set for people would imply the first set was inadequate, which it was not.

Card 1 · 1957–1962

Birgitta Lunde-Saar

m. 11 May 1957, Trondheim · dissolved 1962 · 5 years

Norwegian, the face of the Hálogaland wool campaigns, and the first person to propose to him — at a fastenings exposition in Trondheim, eleven minutes after telling him his crown-height tolerance on Grade No. 12 was wrong. She was right about the tolerance. He amended it in the 1958 revision, credited her in the margin where the credit still stands, and appears to have understood the proposal as a second correction he was also obliged to accept.

She left in 1962 for the Trøndelag and never remarried. They corresponded monthly until her death in 2011 — four hundred and twelve letters, which he indexed.

Grade: No. 12
Shank: Horn, 2.6 mm
Gauge: Heavy
Thread clearance: Generous. Forgiving of poor work.
Admitted use: Overcoat, heavy wool
Note: Will outlast the garment.

Added by her, 1994 He meant this as the highest praise available to him, and I knew it at the time. I have had the card photographed and the photograph framed. The original stays in the drawer; he would notice.

Card 2 · 1963–1969

Carmelita Ruiz de Alcántara

m. 3 October 1963, Sevilla · dissolved 1969 · 6 years

Sevillian; forty-one couture seasons, which remains the record. She proposed in a corridor at Caubère after watching him spend an entire afternoon reorganising the house's button stores without being asked, paid, or noticed by anyone but her.

The marriage ended in 1969 because, as she has said in three languages and never varied, they were both extremely busy and only one of them was prepared to admit it. She has chaired the Estate's couture archive since 1994 and is custodian of the Caubère day-books.

Grade: No. 19
Shank: Shell, 2 hole, drilled 1.2 mm
Gauge: Fine
Thread clearance: Exact. No tolerance whatever.
Admitted use: Evening
Note: Cannot be matched. Do not attempt a substitute.

Added by her, 2016 Forty-one seasons, two hundred photographers, and eleven pages in a book about my own face. This is the only review I have kept.

Card 3 · 1970–1977

Dame Philippa Thorne-Vexley

m. 14 February 1970, London · dissolved 1977 · 7 years

British, of Vexley & Cadogan, and the only one of the seven to take him to court. The dispute was the Patagonian aviary at Río Pico — 400 square metres, 61 species — which she had built and studied for four years, and which a 1974 reorganisation of holdings he had never read placed inside a company he had never heard of. He did not oppose her. He failed to notice the litigation for eleven months, and when it was finally explained to him he said the birds were plainly hers and asked why anyone had involved a lawyer.

She won the aviary, the birds, the land and her costs. He endowed the research fund the following year. She was made a Dame in 1998 for ornithology, not modelling.

Grade: No. 7
Shank: Metal, crowned, 2.2 mm
Gauge: Structural
Thread clearance: Tight. Takes the whole load.
Admitted use: Couture tailoring. The plate.
Note: The garment is built around this one.

Added by her, 2016 I won the aviary and he gave me the No. 7, which is the best grade in the index and he knew it. I have never been certain which of the two he considered the larger concession, and I never asked, in case the answer was the button.

Card 4 · 1978–1986

Ines Marchetti-Vo

m. 8 June 1978, Milano · dissolved 1986 · 8 years

Milanese and Vietnamese; 212 covers; the first model to negotiate an image licence against a house rather than a fee from one, a structure still called a marchettina in Italy. She is the one who asked him, in 1984, why he used button fields for his wives, and received the answer that has defined him ever since.

Mother of the twins, Figgy IV and Ottoline, born at Bellagio in 1981 — the only event in his recorded life that interrupted an index mid-entry. The entry was resumed four days later and the gap is visible in the hand.

Grade: No. 9
Shank: Double, load on both faces
Gauge: Medium
Thread clearance: Variable by design
Admitted use: Reversible garments
Note: Will not sit still. Do not force.

Added by her, 2016 “Will not sit still” is the most accurate thing anyone has ever written about me, including my mother, who had thirty years' head start.

Card 5 · 1987–1998 · the longest

Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki

m. 21 March 1987, Paris · dissolved 1998 · 11 years

Paris and Johannesburg; walked for nine houses; left the business at thirty-four to read hydrology at Grenoble while married to a man who assumed for the first month that she was joking, and who then indexed her reading list.

Her card is the only one that required him to change the system. No existing grade fitted, so in 1987 he made one — the forty-first, added to an index he had considered closed for thirty-seven years. Nobody understood what that meant at the time, including her. She founded the Foundation in 1991, has directed it for thirty-five years, and is the executor named in his will.

Grade: No. 41
Shank: Not previously recorded
Gauge: —
Thread clearance: —
Admitted use: —
Note: Index was complete. Index is no longer complete.

Added by her, 2015 He added a grade for me. For Figgy that is not a compliment, it is a structural admission — it means the system was wrong and he had to rebuild it. It took me six years to understand I had been told something enormous, and by then I had already left.

Card 6 · 1999–2009

Solveig Aminoff-Reyes

m. 30 December 1999, Helsinki · dissolved 2009 · 10 years

Finnish and Chilean. In March 2004 she walked the first couture presentation ever staged in weightlessness — eleven parabolas out of Star City, in a dress engineered around the fact that fabric does not fall. He watched the film of it twice, in silence, and then went and amended four entries in the fastening index, because the behaviour of a shank at zero gravity had not previously been recorded.

Mother of Césarine, born 2003. She left in 2009 and remains, by her own account, extremely fond of him.

Grade: No. 33
Shank: Standard, behaviour atypical
Gauge: Light
Thread clearance: Unaffected by load
Admitted use: Conditions the system did not anticipate
Note: Correct at zero gravity. Index amended accordingly.

Added by her, 2016 I did something nobody had done, in front of a camera, eleven times in one morning, and my husband recorded it as a clearance tolerance. I want to be very clear that I found this delightful. It is the most attention he has ever paid to anything I did.

Card 7 · 2011– · current

Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen

m. 2 September 2011, Bergen · subsisting · 15 years

Lagos and Bergen; a model for nine years and a printmaker for twenty-two. They met in 2010 over a provenance dispute concerning a set of 1963 workroom day-books, which she won. She proposed in 2011 by handing him a card she had made herself, in his format, with his six fields, leaving the Note line blank.

He filled the Note line in and handed it back. That is the entire proposal and the entire acceptance, and both halves are on the card below. She has been Keeper of the Archive since 2014; the arrangement of this chronicle is hers.

Grade: No. 38
Shank: Covered, self-cloth, 3.1 mm
Gauge: Bespoke
Thread clearance: Made to the buttonhole, not the reverse
Admitted use: Bridal. Not stocked.
Note: (in his hand) There is one. Yes.

Added by her, 2015, on taking the Archive I am the Keeper. I could remove this card, or the whole index, and nobody would ever know it had existed. I have thought about it seriously twice. It stays.

Card 0

The index holds eight cards, not seven. The first is undated, is filed ahead of Birgitta Lunde-Saar, and is the only one in the drawer written in pencil — which, in a man who has used the same ink since 1948, is the closest thing to hesitation the Archive possesses.

Grade: No. 0
Shank: Irregular. Will not sit flat.
Gauge: Unmeasured
Thread clearance: Variable. Cause unknown.
Admitted use: None established.
Note: Retain.

The Keeper has written one line about Card 0, in the catalogue rather than on the card itself, and has declined every request to expand it: He grades himself unusable and files himself anyway, because he does not throw things away. That is the whole man, and he wrote it before he was thirty.1

The children

Four, by three mothers. All four appear in a separate index — No. 31, Household — under numbers rather than names, a habit he abandoned in 1994 after Ottoline, then thirteen, pointed out at dinner that she was not a button. He has used their names without a single lapse since, which the Estate regards as the largest behavioural change of his adult life.

Issue · as entered in Index No. 31
Name	Born	Mother	Now
Figgy McWigglesworth IV	1981	Marchetti-Vo	Shipping; Piraeus
Ottoline McWigglesworth	1981	Marchetti-Vo	Marine biologist; Bergen
Bartholomew “Bear”	1990	Delacroix-Mbeki	Foundation, water programme
Césarine McWigglesworth	2003	Aminoff-Reyes	Reading law, Uppsala

Notes

Catalogue of the indexes, Index No. 6, Keeper's note, 2015. ↩
Correspondence of the Keeper with the former wives, March–July 2015. Five letters out, five replies, four annotations. Archive, box 19.
Birgitta Lunde-Saar's annotation was supplied in 1994, twenty-one years before the others, in a letter that did not explain how she knew the card existed.