We were roped in to help, the day Auntie Annu became lady of Extra Great Manor. Even though no one was moving out of the property, we removed more things from it than we carried inside.
All of Auntie’s possessions fitted into one van. But we took out all the furniture that had belonged to the office, the children’s summer camp or the warehouse – and that was a lot. The only things Auntie Annu saved were the upstairs hospital beds. Every bedroom contained one or two metal beds that moved on wheels and had sides you could raise. These made Dad shudder, because he had had his appendix removed when he was nine, but Auntie Annu found them atmospheric.
The evening of moving-in day, Auntie Annu whispered to me, ‘Come, Saara, I’ve got something to show you.’
We climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. Two passages led in different directions. We went into the west passage. Auntie opened the third door we came to.
Behind the door was an unoccupied bedroom, with a bed and two old wooden chairs. Through the window, you could see the front lawn, the fountain, the van and a pile of cardboard boxes. But Auntie walked to the wall on the left-hand side.
‘Look,’ Auntie Annu said. Gripping the upper edge of the middle section of wall panelling, she gave it a yank.
‘A secret door!’ I whispered.
And indeed, the panelling slid aside soundlessly. There was a small room behind the secret door, large enough to take a person. Auntie let me try opening the door. You could feel the small pin at the top of the board with your fingers. You had to flick this to the left. Then you heard a gentle click and the panel opened.
We entered the secret room. Auntie had put two velvet cushions and a wool rug on the floor, so it was nicer to sit on. The rear wall had a small window in it. It didn’t let in much light, because it was covered by a thick creeper.
‘From the outside, you can only see the creeper,’ Auntie said.
I had never been in a real secret room before. I had never been to a manor house before, either, and now, suddenly, Auntie had moved into a fairy-tale castle.
Because the secret room seemed like a good place for talking about secret things, the sort you couldn’t mention at nursery, on the bus or at friends’ houses, I decided to ask Auntie Annu:
‘Auntie, how did you know the Double Jackpot numbers?’ To be on the safe side, I said it quite softly.
Auntie Annu nodded, thought for a moment and then looked me in the eye. ‘It was pure chance.’
‘Then why can’t you talk about it, if it was chance?’
‘That’s precisely why,’ Auntie Annu said. ‘It’s so hard to explain.’
We listened to the noises coming from downstairs. Mum was washing up in the kitchen, and Dad was in the hallway, making a racket in the middle of all the piles of boxes. You heard more clatter in the manor house than in the block of flats, because Auntie let us wear shoes indoors. This was because it was moving-in day, but also because the floors were so cold and the stairs were all splintery.
‘Saara! Saara! We’ll be going in a minute!’ Mum’s voice echoed up the chimney flue and through the bedroom stove.
I looked at Auntie Annu, who nodded, meaning we ought to go back downstairs.
We stepped silently out of the secret room and shut the wall panel.
‘Can we keep this as our secret?’ I whispered to Annu. ‘Sure,’ Auntie replied.
Then we went back downstairs.
I felt good all evening, because now I had a lady of the manor for an aunt, and I was the only one who knew about the secret room in the wall.