A man is digging a grave at midnight. His shirt is stained with blood, and what he is burying alive is a new-born baby. Against all odds, his secret will come to light through the agency of a nurse, the monstrous yet courageous Betty Potts, who now runs an old people’s home in what was once a grand old house.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that with a story like this, written by someone who can write real prose, publishers would be gagging for it. If so, you know nothing of the way modern publishers work. Despite being included in Susan Hill’s Penguin collection of best short stories by women, and despite having won three prizes for her debut, Family Myths and Legends, and her extraordinary short story collection, Indefinite Nights, Pat Ferguson was a casualty of Andre Deutsch. When that publishing house crashed and burnt, so did the careers of their mid-list authors – those who, with sufficient talent and staying power, were expected to become the new generation of major novelists. Now, unless you are 21 and have the looks of a model as well as an Oxbridge degree, you are unlikely to be published at all. Does it matter? Yes, it does. Pat Ferguson’s It So Happens is published by a new, tiny imprint, Solidus. It has a dreadful cover, and no marketing budget whatsoever. It is also really, really good – think of Muriel Spark crossed with Barbara Vine and you might get an inkling of what this slim novel, part ghost-story, part black comedy, has to offer.

Cabotin Court is exactly what the inhabitants of Deborah Moggach’s recent novel, These Foolish Things, were trying to escape in their decrepitude. A former Almshouse for elderly women, it is a thoroughly British institution, from its tinned fruit and lino to its muddled carers and air of gentility. Run by the ghastly Betty, who dreams of restoring it to its former glory, it is as joylessly skint as most such institutions. To Betty, the indigent but virtuous females are of secondary importance to getting the house a makeover after the uninspired reign of her predecessor – and she is willing to turn to blackmail to get the money she needs for this. Rosemary, her deputy, is “plump and brisk and fiftyish…within, however, she knew herself to be a rather delicate creature, easily bored, prone to depression, a poor sleeper: sensitive, in a word.” She isn’t, of course, but the delight of this novel is the way it shows you all its characters in palimpsest, with their comical misapprehensions concerning themselves and their failure to spot real danger. Rosemary’s still-spry assistant, Annie, mysteriously apprehends things about the past and future behind the blank face and nervous mannerisms of an idiot. Alethea Troy, progressively blinded and prevented from her one joy, reading, is the moral centre of the novel and their friendship develops in touching counterpoint to the selfish ambitions of the other characters.

For Betty knows something about a wealthy new patroness of Cabotin Court that could cause a nasty scandal. As she embarks on a crude career as a decorator, choosing hilariously horrible replacements for the humble furnishings that offended, other characters develop unexpected quirks. Rosemary is progressively seduced by a con-man who wants to persuade her to set up a restaurant with him. Alethea reveals her glamorous past in the world of Hollywood as a private secretary to a now-forgotten writer, and gains a brief and glorious new vision after a cataract operation. The operation will kill her, but her amazed pleasure at seeing the world as “a Holbein drawing” is described with great passion and insight. (Ferguson was a nurse, which may account for the particular imaginative sympathy of these passages.) Yet it is Betty who, remembering the one good deed of her life, has most to repent.

Humane, complex, disquieting and very funny, It So Happens is as enjoyable and skilful as Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up or Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori – a novel that makes us consider the last things while showing us how late and foolishly we arrive at them. It characters are preoccupied by money, food, family and soft furnishings. Death, when it comes, is a surprise to them. They have learnt very little worth knowing in the course of their lives; but anyone who reads this brilliant novel will learn rather more.

The New Statesman, June 2004