Mary Archer: 'There are worse things in life than adultery - Daily Telegraph

Theirs is a puzzling partnership. The enduring liaison of ebullient, disaster-prone chancer and cool, unblemished academic has had people guessing for years. What is the glue, other than the many millions Lord Archer has made by writing bestsellers, that makes the marriage stick?

Dont you have to work at growing together? she asks. Our personality types are quite different but we share a lot of attitudes and tastes. I am proud of Jeffreys achievements and I think he is proud of mine. Weve been together so long [they married in 1966] I cant really imagine life without him. It is very sad when people who have been married for a long time split up in acrimony. If marriage doesnt work, its better that people divorce early.

To those who suggest she stayed for the money, she long ago pointed out that she would be a much richer woman divorced than married. In picking up the pieces after Jeffreys follies and escapades, fragrant Mary has usually come across as the injured party, confronting bankruptcy, sexual scandal and his two-year imprisonment for perjury with a show of swan-like dignity. She mounted a ferocious campaign to clear his name.

I dont feel injured at all, she says. I am not perfect. I am not easy to live with. I am very obsessed with work. I havent always been there. In fact, I havent often been there when Jeffrey and the children would have preferred I was. And theyve been very tolerant of that. Jeffrey has to have an operation for a cataract and I will make absolutely sure I am there for that.

She believes there are worse threats to a marriage than adultery. Far worse things. Hostility. Cruelty. A marriage based on affection and friendship and deep knowledge, each of the other, can survive. It can survive infidelity better than it can survive indifference or hostility.

They have been giving a lot of thought to survival. Who would cope the best after the death of the other? Either of us would be very lonely without the other and life would never be the same again, she says. He would probably cope better without me than I would without him. But thats the sort of experiment its impossible to conduct. Lets hope we dont have to find out.

Her brush with mortality seems to have melted a layer of Mary Archers fabled glacial reserve. Though she has a formal, rather queenly way of speaking, she is direct, attentive and down to earth. There were the practical questions Am I really going to survive the seven years my will assumes I will? Are my affairs in order? but also a daily audit of using her time well.

Now, when I go to bed each night I think: What is the thing I did today that I wanted to do? And in the morning: What do I really want to do today?

She refused Jeffreys exhortation to go anywhere, do anything, no matter what the cost, and had her operation on the NHS in a public ward at Addenbrookes, Cambridge, close to the Archers country home, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

There was an odd sense of disconnection when I walked into the ward as a patient and later, on the other side of the door, I was chairman again. Pragmatic and well-researched, she decided against a laparoscopic approach to surgery (smaller scar, more puncture marks) in favour of a long vertical cut (big operation, big hole an advantage). It will fade to a thin white line, she says. I might wear a bikini again in a couple of years. It has given her a 95 per cent chance of being disease-free at five years, which she considers tantamount to a cure.

One good thing about bladder cancer, she says, is that it produces the symptom of blood in the urine quite early. My public health message from all this is: if you notice blood in your urine, get yourself checked out.

She had no fears about the operation, but the diagnosis was a shock. I had taken good care of myself. Im not fat. I dont drink too much. I dont do anything I shouldnt apart from being a chemist, perhaps.

When I was young, I handled a lot of organic solvents and heavy metals. In those days there was less awareness of health and safety. Maybe that had something to do with my cancer. Maybe it was the hair dye Ive used since I started to go grey Ive now switched to a much gentler one. Maybe there is something in my genetic make-up that predisposes me to cancer, in which case I hope I havent passed it on to my two boys [William, 39, and James, 37]. Maybe its not to do with anything.

Next year, Dr Mary Archer, 66, will stand down as chairman (she refuses to be called a chairperson) of the hospital trust after 10 years. Her posthumous objective is to see an East of England childrens hospital take shape on the huge biomedical campus which Addenbrookes and the Rosie Hospital occupy. Jeffrey jokes that she would probably sell his art collection to fund it. A second ambition is to write the fourth and final volume of her series on the photo-conversion of solar energy. The third, to learn to play the organ properly, with my feet.

A vision of fitness in a cricket sweater and shorts, Lord Archer strides briskly into view the penthouse is so big you can see people coming and disappears into a galleried area above us. With Mary on the mend, he is about to leave for Spain to revise The Sins of the Father, the second in his five-novel series, The Clifton Chronicles. The first, Only Time Will Tell, is already a number one paperback bestseller. Inventive, indefatigable, he writes a book a year.

In the Seventies, when Archer began to write his way out of 400,000 of debt, his wife edited the rough drafts and is sometimes credited with having made his books readable. No, no, no, she says. I couldnt write a story to save my life. He is a great storyteller. I am hot on commas. Even if I had had such a gift in the first place, my scientific training would probably have ground it out of me. I do read his books at a late stage and put in commas and pick up small points of fact. I admire his discipline, his ability to hold so much in his head for weeks and months.

Fiction, as you might guess, is not her preferred form of recreation. She likes popular books about science Bill Bryson and Jared Diamond are favourites and is currently reading her friend Ruth Leons tragic account of her husband Sheridan Morleys manic depression.

Odd as it may seem, given her reputation for restraint, Mary Archer is by no means a reluctant celebrity. Being on show seems to go with the job I mean the job of being Jeffreys wife, she says. Im glad I got through my cancer operation before it became public knowledge, but now it has, Im very pleased if I can help other cancer patients to see that they, too, may be lucky.

The Rosie Hospital provides womens, maternity and neonatal services at Cambridge University Hospitals. To continue to provide the best care to mothers and babies of the future, it needs to expand its facilities to meet anticipated increases in both the number and complexity of cases during the coming years. Go to therosiecampaign.org.uk to find out more about the campaign and donate directly