We come to the final story in our anthology, the bookend which circles back to Ernestine and Kit, those older ladies who seemed so respectable when we started reading, a dozen stories ago. ‘Physics and Chemistry’ is about two women who are referred to by the subjects they teach, but are entirely individual characters. Physics, particularly, may appear stern, but their relationship proves the depths of her emotions.
The lives of most LGBT+ people in the past had to be habitually secretive and repressed.
“Sometimes they had two teachers from Lenzie High School round – Rosemary and Nancy, PE and music, who also, like them, lived together and bought each other comfortable slippers for Christmas. Neither Rosemary and Nancy nor Physics and Chemistry, ever, ever mentioned the nature of their relationship to each other.”
‘Physics and Chemistry’ centres around one day when everything changes for them. It is not a long story, but Kay manages to sketch out the two women’s histories, their daily normality, what happens to change that, and what the results are, without it ever feeling rushed.
So this anthology ends. The reader looks up, feeling in a particular way because of the final paragraphs of that last story, and the end sentence: “It could always change colour.”.
Then, I hope, you sit back and take a moment, thinking about your journeys in time and place through all twelve stories, about their common themes and their contradictions, and all you have been told about human experiences. And I hope that you will be glad to have read them.
Collected in Why Don’t You Stop Talking,Picador, 2002, and published in The Barcelona Review, issue 29: March – April 2002, available here. I read it in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, selected and introduced by Philip Hensher, 2018
A Personal Anthology 