Elizabeth Taylor has been a wonderful discovery for me – firstly as a novelist and then as a short story writer. I had read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) and A View of the Harbour (1947) which if taken in isolation suggests a certain direction of interest for Taylor’s writing. Wrong! ‘The Fly-paper’ illustrates how diverse and talented Taylor is, a writer who has been underrated for too long, a writer who gets under the skin of the darkness in human behaviour.
‘The Fly-paper’ is a suspenseful and chilling exploration of trust, innocence, and danger. It’s a haunting and unsettling read. Sylvia, an eleven-year-old girl, takes a bus to her music lesson. When a man starts harassing her, she is reassured by a middle-aged lady who comes to the rescue and takes her home to her own house. The shocking denouement features a table laid for three and the flypaper of the title. It ends with the apparent banality of having tea with an older couple. But all is not well, not well at all. She’s shown us all the clues. We can’t ignore them.
First published in The Cornhill Magazine, Spring 1969. Collected in The Devastating Boys, 1972, and Complete Short Stories, 2012, both Virago Modern Classics
A Personal Anthology 